Geographical Imagination Questions for Discussion: Term Paper

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The contradiction between science and technology tugs at the strings of our very souls. We feel it deep down. Even totally secular analysts such as Marx had to reconcile nature and technology (ibid, 31). Analysts such as Schmidt have expanded upon this Marxian analysis of alienation between nature and technology as Marx (the ultimate proponent of the Hegelian dialect) laments over how we are stuck in what Hegel would have called "first nature." This is nature outside of us. "Second nature" really never comes to fruition. We are not able to break free of it and society is still internal to nature (ibid, 34).

This mold allows us to analyze sources such as Schwarz effectively when looking at the culture of a country such as Brazil. Here, the contradictions in liberalism between the forces of "free labor" (how can wage slavery be seen as freedom) and chattel slavery in the 19th century were nakedly evident. Schwarz sees this as most embarrassing to Brazilians themselves. Just as in Smith's paradigm where the citizen of America is embarrassed and feels guilty about the inherent contradiction in his liberal society and its sometimes barbaric dominance of nature, so too Brazilian society was embarrassed by its failure in Enlightenment eyes (Schwarz, 19-20).

This "revolutionary imagination" has played out in many other parts of Latin America as well. This author sees students on campus all of the time wearing very stylish Che Guevara t-shirts that complete their western Levi blue jeans. While we all might not be polite enough to hide our laughter, it is not always so funny.

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Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo argues that twentieth-century revolutionary challenges to colonialism and capitalism (such as handsome Che and other revolutionary company) have not only failed to resist effectively, but are actually related to the capitalism that they portray themselves as combating. One only needs to look at present day Cuba to realize this. And in the West, developmentalist narratives have justified and postwar capitalism as the natural order of things. The "revolutionaries" in the former Soviet Bloc have been almost all overthrown. Essentially, the revolutionary consciousness has failed and the gringo still casts a large shadow as any revolutionary from the Zapatistas in Mexico to Chavez in Venezuela will confirm (Saldana-Portillo, 17).

To address such failures, Wallerstein put the systems in world systems analysis. He describes the "world-system" as a social reality construct made up of interconnected nations, households, firms, classes, identity groups of and NGOs and organizations of all kinds. Wallerstein identifies and highlights key moments (turning points) and their significance in the development of the modern world-system such as the development of a capitalist world-economy in the 16th century Renaissance, two centuries of liberalism beginning in the French Revolution of 1789 as well as the undermining of that liberal centrism on both sides of the Iron Curtain in 1968 (Wallerstein, 1-2).

What is so interestingly similar to this is that we noted earlier in the case of Brazil how much of liberalism, freedom and capitalism as an ideology are in many ways a construct that is there to keep the toilers and proletarians in check.

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