Suchergebnisse

Assumption is the story of a slave named Nathan living in a racially hostile environment in antebellum and post-Civil War Louisiana. Assumption Parish was the kind of place where slaves were whipped frequently, where disease and rustic living were the normal course of life, where the swamp, with all its savage foreboding, loomed nearby. It was a place, Nathan discovered ,that traded in men's spirits, breaking them little by little for purposes that were difficult for him to comprehend. Like many slaves of his time, Nathan is raised without biological parents. His surrogate mother, Abbie, longs for the day when slavery ended. But she is too conservative in nature, too aware of her powerlessness, to do anything to force change. Nathan's surrogate fathers, on the other hand, are only too willing to rebel against the plantation system. Nefs, in fact, covertly plots revolt. He hopes Nathan will join him in this crusade. But even after being brutally whipped for a petty, accidental infraction of the plantation's unspoken code of conduct, Nathan does not fight back but instead opts to run from the plantation. This illusion of leaving the harshest of the Old South's conditions was fomented by Nathan's other surrogate father, Pinder Beauregard, who dreamed Nathan would become a New Orleans musician as Pinder once had been. Eventually, the plantation's slaves revolted and Nathan escaped, though not before witnessing Pinder death in battle. Nathan wanders the swamp where he discovers freedom is not what he'd expected. Every institution, from the military to religion to marriage, is closed off to him. Nathan falls into a deep fever, like the kind that killed his parents. He is returned to the plantation where he grew up, recovering to find the plantation has changed little since he's been away. The biggest shock is the fate of Nefs, who has been rendered into a catatonic, bootlicking, house servant. Nathan sees in Nefs his future self, a strange alien puppet with barely a mind of his own. He decides his musical life can wait until he can begin a campaign to topple the post-Civil War society. ; 2004-12-01 ; M.A. ; Arts and Sciences, Department of English ; Masters ; This record was generated from author submitted information.

In this reprint of the Isaac & Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize lecture (November 2005), the award recipient interrogates the relationship between proof & that which is embedded in the assumptions of perfect competition, productive relations, & identical production functions that result in identical mathematical results for credit or labor market islands to argue that an inherent bias flows from Marx assumptions. Analysis of the assumption of the standard of necessity in Grundrisse, & the assumptions of a constant standard of necessity & the constant rate of surplus leaves out a factor in the connection between productivity increases & relative surplus-value. The author proposes a new (x) factor variable to represent the degree of separation among workers, changing the condition for relative surplus-value to a rise in the degree of separation of workers. Class struggle, although not absent from Capital, is thus changed by not freezing class struggle from the side of workers. The importance of identifying variables & assumptions is related to Marx's intention to rewrite much of Capital. The new (x) factor variable allows no return to the comfort of determinism or the scientism of the Marxist economists who believe in the solution to the "transformation problem." The author concludes with the proposal for scholars to take up Marx's preference for the revolutionary project over the epistemological. References. J. Harwell

According to Bowers, conservative movements like the Wise Use movement have as their goals 'the colonization of other cultures as new markets and as sources of natural resources' and the opening of public lands to the mining and petroleum industries 'so that Americans can drive sport utility vehicles' [p. 52]. Bowers asks 'If conservatism has to do with the well-being of communities, families, and individuals-and now with conserving natural systems so that the quality of life of future generations is not diminished-it is difficult to see how the alliance between corporate America and recent Republican presidents represents a defensible form of conservatism' [p. 30].