When Ants Beset the Elephant: Rent Extraction and Resistance on China's E-commerce Platform

E-commerce in China has developed and expanded rapidly in recent years. Conflicts and confrontations have accumulated in parallel. Using Taobao e-marketplace – one pillar platform of the Alibaba group – as its case, this article aims to analyse the developmental logic and profit-seeking strategies of e-commerce capitalism in China and beyond. It also investigates how small online merchants responded to and resisted the particular rent-extractive and exclusive mechanisms designed by the platform. I attempt to identify the emerging responses from below to both the creative and destructive sides of this newest capitalist development in China. I argue that, despite the militancy and innovation involved in these movements, and despite the use of Maoist rhetoric borrowed from the past, the contentious collective actions (online or offline) organized by these small online merchants lack the solidarity, the shared identity and consciousness, and the powerful ideological language observed among the “traditional” working class in industrial capitalism, and hence they are more improvised, transient, and easily defeated.

Laibach, Anti-fashion and Subversion

The worldwide renowned Slovenian industrial alternative music group Laibach, which was also a member of the multimedia artists’ collective called NSK, has been a subject of many professional discussions. This article attempts to analyse Laibach’s conception of a uniform according to the theory of anti-fashion. As one of the most recognizable elements expressing a mythical, totalitarian aura, inseparably linked with the performers’ distant and constrained attitude, Laibach’s uniform can be erroneously comprehended as anti-fashion clothing, expressing fixed and rigid social environments. The analysis of Laibach’s television interview from 1983, in which the band is directly imitating the ruling ideological language, shows that the strategy of over-identification and subversion represent dominant principles of Laibach’s actions, combining them with the retro-method of using symbols and images of various cultural traditions and periods, as seen in their diversity of clothing worn, including the Yugoslav military uniform, miner and hunting uniforms, jeans and shirts, and even fashionable items. With the performative dimension in the ideological ritual and by emphasizing totalitarian tendencies in contemporary society, Laibach endeavours to show that all changeable multiform clothes are uniforms – timeless, universal and deprived of semiological meaning and thus surpasses the distinction of fashion and anti-fashion or fixed and modish costume. Nearly forty years after the establishment of the group, Laibach is conventionally dressed in regular clothes, nevertheless providing a sentiment of wearing a collective’s uniform.

THE STRATEGY OF DECONSTRUCTION OF THE SOVIET PROTOTEXT IN V. PELEVIN’S PROSE

The article deals with the problem of reconstruction of the Soviet picture of the world in V. Pelevin’s prose. The researcher focuses on the author’s strategy for the deconstruction of the Soviet prototext, defined as destruction of the conventional linguistic structures of the ideological language of the Soviet era and stereotypes of their perception, which is characteristic of postmodernism and V. Pelevin’s idiostyle. The author proposes an original methodology for describing the strategy of deconstruction of the Soviet prototext, systematizes the methods used by the writer for de-stereotyping the signs of Soviet discourse.

Post-colonial Literary Texts as Reading Texts within Today’s Schools

In the making of an edition of the first modern Dutch slavery novel, De stille plantage (1931) by Surinamese author Albert Helman, all kinds of questions arise. There are issues of postcolonial contextualization, historical commentary and the way a text gets its actual significance in high schools. All these issues have their own sensibility in the light of recent fierce debates on slavery and its impact on western societies. The editors do have to take into account more than ever before their own position and questions of ideological responsibility, apart from issues of didactical and pedagogical nature. The question is raised whether such a modern edition does not touch more upon ideological language critique than postcolonial contextualization.

Anthropomorphic Figurines at Perdigões Enclosure: Naturalism, Body Proportion and Canonical Posture as Forms of Ideological Language

This paper focusses on a set of anthropomorphic figurines. It suggests that realistic human proportion and canonical body posture were pursued in the carving of these objects as a means of expressing ideology, in a context of diversified forms of manipulation of bodies in funerary practices. It is argued that, against a background of predominantly schematic art, the more realistic and canonical anthropomorphic representation of the human body was used to communicate a set of ideological statements in a more controlled and immediate way, in a period of ontological and cosmological transition.

The Constitutional Treaty as a Reflexive Constitution

The “Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe” elicits divergent scholarly responses. An apologetic view holds that it is the best of all possible constitutions, given the current constellations of political forces. Such a viewpoint is countered by a mixed choir of critics for whom the document is simply another treaty, a “nostalgic project,” or a merely “semantic constitution.” Some even believe that the recourse to constitutional rhetoric endangers the rational substance of the European status quo; others fear that this very conceptuality could be damaged. The present chapter endeavors to find a third approach. It offers a critical stance as regards the unfortunate, phraseological, sometimes even ideological language of the Constitutional Treaty. Simultaneously, the constitutional text is taken seriously in its normative statements. This approach aims to reconstruct the document from a point of view which depicts it, despite its contradictions, as a project with a rightful place in the tradition of Western constitutionalism.