The thriller that unmasks the capitalist crisis

Scan page 9

US cruise missile-US armaments have been supplied in huge quantities to Iran as imperialism's policeman in the Middle East 'Tell me, Dr. Hitchcock, what future of the capitalistic system?' As versatile mind.

'It is extremely precarious.' I agree. But tell me your reasons for It is not often that international best-selling novels contain lengthy discourses on the instability and insoluble contradictions of capitalism.

But Paul E. Erdman's latest book, The Crash of 79, actually centres its attention on the developing economic crisis and the implications of imperialist policies in the Middle East, to produce a gripping narrative.

While Erdman's • previous smash hit The Billion Dollar Killing based its plot on high level manipulation of paper currency in relation to gold, The Crash of 79 is a story conducted at government level, examining the material motive forces behind the US imperialist regime, the semi-feudal despotism in Saudi Arabia, and the vicious CIA-installed dictatorial rule of the Shah of Iran, and drawing from these sources the basis of its plot.

The narrator, banker Bill Hitchcock, is hired by the Saudi Arabian government to undertake a massive programme for recycling oil revenue in order to prop up the ailing US economy, and thus guarantee American military backing for the Saudi regime.

Meanwhile in Iran the Shah lays plans to acquire and to use nuclear weapons alongside his already vast battery of sophisticated military hardware and his colossal army in a bid to seize the Saudi oilfields and thus control the whole Guff area.

This involves detailed plan: ning of ways and means to obtain quantities of plutonium from Iranian nuclear power plants, and advanced scientific know-how from the supposedly "neutral" Swiss government, which has developed its own defensive nuclear shield.

The most contrived aspect of the plot of Erdman's novel is his attempt to link these two parallel plots together through the romantic relationship between banker Hitchcock and the daughter of the Swiss nuclear scientist hired by the Shah to make his bombs.

Authentic In almost every other respect the plot is startlingly authentic -though the economic analysis is hardly surprisingly, not based on Marx's tenet of labour as the source of surplus value under capitalism.

To you think of the said, Yamani had a The working relationship between the major US banks and the government is tellingly described in a two-page account showing the role of "a very closely knit old-boy net" of top bankers' nominees in "keeping the world safe for American capitalism in the post-war era" through direct governmental control.

Banker Hitchcock conciudes:

"I had always been highly sceptical about any "conspiracy' theories of history. You know, the stuff about the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the old boys at Morgan Stanley, First Boston, Lehman Brothers and a few other places like that being really in control of America and thus the world, through their control of the world's only really big capital market . . . But by the time I was middleaged, had become less sceptical".

And indeed as the story unfolds Erdman skilfully and convincingly sketches in the mechanisms through which the interests of the capitalist class and its top leaders both create The Hiroshima bomb and then respond to economic crisis, manipulating the puppet figures of bourgeois democracy in the elected governments.

In addition he points to the chronic contradictions faced by US capitalism, and in particular the banks:

"Their problem lay in both sides of the balance sheet. On the asset side, where the loans and investments of a bank are listed, their situation was bad enough to give an honest bank examiner a case of cardiac arrest, even though it is generally considered extremely bad form to drop dead in a bank.

"For at least 25 percentone quarter-of the assets of the top fifteen banks in the United States were worthless.

They were carried on the books at full value, of course. But they were simply not there. They represented loans and investments that had gone down the drain, totally and irrevocably"

Fictional assets

In a six-page analysis, banker Hitchcock convincingly lists real LISTER of "79" n, publis y Sphere, reviews "The by Paul E. ed in. paperprice 95p.

estate, tanker fleets, giant loi to gaint bankrupt corporatio loans to bankrupt underder oped nations and grow holdings in bonds of bankru US state and city administ tions as the fictional assets the banks.

• And he goes on to point c the crisis on the liabilities sie emphasising that:

"You can have all the b loans in the world, as a bar as long as nobody knows they will keep putting money your bank ... As any bank can tell you, no bank ever we belly up because of bad loans i its books. What kills banks is shortage of liquidity-ready-ca -to pay off doubters when thi appear at the door"

The novel builds on t conception of immediate ar impending crisis, and imagin a move by Saudi Arabia to pro up this rickety structure 1 shifting investment from Euror to the USA and unilaterall lowering the price of US c imports in order to restore tr competitive advantage American capital against Euror and Japan.

But into this schem intrudes an internecine strugg within the Saudi ruling cliqui and the Shah, with his desperat mber 3 includes:

Xith World Congress of USFI). ans ins, veling Jpt iraof nis nd les by Dil of plan to stabilise his power by annexing the much larger Saudi oilfields, and his willingness to use his huge armoury to do so.

Iran is accurately described as imperialism's chosen bulwark against communism in the Middle East, with military capacity in some areas exceeding that of the USA.

In two pages Erdman catalogues the formidable air, sea and ground forces and weaponry placed at the disposal of the Shah; by international imperialism.

It is but a small step further to enviseage the addition of small scale nuclear bombs to an already lethal force in order to provide a plausible basis for the Saudi-Iranian war which provides the climax to the novel itself.

The war finds the US almost unable militarily to prevent the Shah's initiative, and triggers a huge financial crash, in which international bankers and US small savers together engage in a mad dash to withdraw their holdings from the US banks and corporations.

The run on the dollar and on the banks is staved off by a wholesale turn to the printing press to produce, billions. of inflationary paper dollarsreviving the horrors of Germany in the 1920s.

Nuclear bombs are dropped on the Saudi oilfields, cutting off half the world's oil supply:

"The world was now forced to live with a bank system that lay in ruins, with monetary chaos, and with the prospect of having to survive on half its former oil reserves. The lights, everywhere, gradually began to flicker and fade"

Erdman': novel is written from the standpoint of a defender or capitalism, in the "It might be said that Nixon was helped both into and out of the White House by the biggest bond lawyer in Wall Street annals, John Mitchell. And Jerry Ford was given little choice but to delegate half of his Presidency to the leading alumnus of the Rockefeller training camp, the good Herr Doktor Kissinger.

Finally the Coach himself, Nelson Rockefeller, took leave of absence from the Big Apple to make sure Jerry did not screw up the other half. " (p86)

The working class is referred to only as an obstacle to certain capitalist strategies.

But in stripping away illusions in the stability of capitalism, or in the possibility of a "rational" solution to the capitalist crisis, and pointing to the real contradictions faced by imperialism in its death agony, the book offers an entertaining antidote to the glamourised banalities of contemporary 'spy' and crime fiction.

Despite being billed as "The No. 1 International Superseller"

The Crash of 79 is worth reading.

US jet fighters on a production line 'Communists' Against Revolution, containing the important essay "The Theory of Structural Assimilation" by Tim Wohlforth is the book on post-war Stalinism that Mandel and Healy would not discuss.

Make sure you get your copy -available at £1.75 plus 20p NW5 1HR Two Endaya Communists on Postmar g cattriam Against

Scan page 10

SO CIALIST PRESS, 'ednesday 30 August, 1978 NOUSTRIAL męh, E

----- pull-quotes -----

* WSL British Perspectives * The Poisoned Well (document

* The Spartacist School of Invention. rice 60p plus 20p p&p from WSL, 31, Dartmouth Park Hill, London NW5

THEORETICAL JOURNAL OF THE WORKERS SOCIALIST LEAGUE

p&p from: WSL, 31, Dart- mouth Park Hill, London