Comedy is reality. As of course reality is fun. In this as in most cases there is a punch line. And the joke is on us.
Main Street finally caught up to Wall Street. To keep wages low profits as high as possible ah capitalism. NEiLc
Los Angeles Review of Books - How To Read Žižek
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=897&fulltext=1&media=
... Remaining faithful to the Marxist tradition, Žižek believes that the most apt name for the conflict at the heart of modern society is “class struggle.” The “struggle” is not between two pre-existing classes — the working class and the capitalist or owner class — that happen to enter into some kind of conflict. These two classes are the “fallout” of capitalism, which is itself conflictual in nature: people “worked” before capitalism, but the working class as a massive population of landless laborers who must sell their labor power to survive only came about as a result of capitalist development. Similarly, there were rich people before capitalism, but not a class of people who sought to extract profits from this “free” labor power. The conflict is the system, the system the conflict.
“Class struggle” is important for Žižek because it produces two completely incompatible and conflictual views of the world — the difference between the exploited and the exploiter is more than a difference of opinion, it is a completely different framework. Reasonable people from “both sides” cannot come together and hash out a compromise that takes everyone’s interests into account. The “middle ground” is an unbridgeable chasm, and ideology represents our attempts to paper over and ignore that chasm.
So when people in the U.S. produce the vision of the Mexican immigrant as the workaholic welfare queen, what is really at stake can’t be a conflict between cultures, because for Žižek that would imply pre-existing, more or less stable or homogeneous cultures that first exist and then subsequently happen to come into conflict. Nor can it be about the Mexicans who come to America and disturb the balance of our local culture, because that balance didn’t exist in the first place. No, the conflict is inherent in capitalist exploitation. The Mexicans aren’t taking “our” jobs — the owners are doing whatever they can to suppress wages, with no interest in who they pay.
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Mexicans have been coming to Chicago since 1924 with the passage of the Immigration Act restricting Eastern and Southern Europeans. The labor contractors simply went south. The act passed with little opposition, based on the racist testimony of professors from Harvard and Yale who had given intelligence tests in English to our illiterate ancestors and pronounced them sub-human.
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