Bolshevizing America: C.L.R. James and the Black Vanguard

Much of the scholarship that dismisses James’ placement of blacks in the vanguard obscures the significant theoretical contribution of an avowed Marxist who remained bound to nothing but his own conscience and interpretation of Marxist-Leninist theory. James, himself, was aware of the addition that he, together with Trotsky, had made to the American radical landscape: “We claim particularly that our special theoretical contribution to the Marxist understanding of the Negro question, is that the Negro’s place is not at the tail but in the very vanguard of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism.” Moreover, this argument was not transient—he continued to profess this role of the black proletariat until the United States deported him in 1953. Following James’ 1948 speech “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in US”—the last time James explicitly mentioned the “vanguard” prior to his deportation—Simon Owens, a black stamping machine operator from Detroit, recalled: “I never was so shocked and so happy in all my life…That was complete for me. I couldn’t see how I could even think of leaving the party after hearing him.” This essay will, first, illuminate James’ conception of the vanguard. Scholars who have asserted his abandonment thereof have found reason to do so, and I will try to clarify the space between James’ philosophy and their extrapolations. The pages to follow also strive to shed light on the ways in which James’ philosophy remained disconnected from American reality. The New Deal was already an unprecedented shift to the left for many Americans in the 1930s, and yet James believed that a revolution much more radical in nature was not far off. What inspired him to think that socialism would take root in the United States?Bachelor of Art

Automated Function Implementation via Conditional Parameterized Quantum Circuits with Applications to Finance

Classical Monte Carlo algorithms can theoretically be sped up on a quantum computer by employing amplitude estimation (AE). To realize this, an efficient implementation of state-dependent functions is crucial. We develop a straightforward approach based on pre-training parameterized quantum circuits, and show how they can be transformed into their conditional variant, making them usable as a subroutine in an AE algorithm. To identify a suitable circuit, we propose a genetic optimization approach that combines variable ansatzes and data encoding. We apply our algorithm to the problem of pricing financial derivatives. At the expense of a costly pre-training process, this results in a quantum circuit implementing the derivatives' payoff function more efficiently than previously existing quantum algorithms. In particular, we compare the performance for European vanilla and basket options.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, 2 algorithm

The competitive advantage of nations: the importance of the national environment for strategic management in the EC

Summary: In this paper we investigate the usefulness for strategic management of Porter's framework of analysis of the competitive advantage of nations in particular regarding the importance of the changing national environment within the EC. It appears that Porter's framework - supplemented with contributions from the Industrial Organization field and with special attention to the growing importance of the service sector and the particular characteristics of services - can indeed contribute to our understanding of the importance of the national environment within the EC for strategic management. However, much research has to be done. In this connection, the paper proposes a few key questions for further research

Physical Activity Training for Functional Mobility in Older Persons

The effectiveness of low-intensity physical activity for improving functional ability and psycho logical well-being in chronically impaired older individuals was demonstrated in a pilot study. Participants who completed 6 weeks of structured low-intensity exercise (N = 77) improved in the time and number of steps required to walk a measured course, in self-assessments of mobility and flexibility, and in three measures of well-being. Those who continued to exercise in a peer-led program (n = 32) maintained improvements in mobility and optimism after 18 weeks.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68101/2/10.1177_073346489501400401.pd