國立臺灣師範大學文學院英語學系

碩士論文

Department of English, College of Liberal Arts

National Taiwan Normal University

Master’s Thesis

以共同體作為人性之綻放：

喬治・歐威爾《巴黎倫敦落魄記》

與蔡明亮《郊遊》之比較

Community as the Budding of Humanity: The Comparison

between George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

and Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs

粘正穎

Nien, Jeng-Ying

指導教授：梁孫傑 博士

中華民國 109年 9月

September 2020

i

Acknowledgements

The completion of this thesis has to be credited to my advisor, Dr. Sun-Chieh Liang, an

admirable and respectable professor. He guided me through the journey of analyzing literary

materials and organizing my ideas logically. Without his instruction, the layout of this thesis

would have been much looser and less academic. He also gave me much time and space to

conceive my own thoughts freely, and he would act as the role directing me to the correct path

whenever I got lost in digression. I really owed a great debt of thanks to my instructor.

I am also grateful to the committee members of my oral defense, Prof. Kun-liang Chuang

and Prof. Yuh-chuan Shao. They gave me an abundance of advice and comments which was

not only helpful in my subsequent revision but also inspiring for future study. I also thank so

much Annie Chuang, Mary Wang, and White, who helped review my thesis before the oral

defense.

My parents were my best support. They let me explore the meaning of life and choose

what I wanted to do without pressure. I also have to thank Prof. Tzu-chung Su, Prof. Hsiu-

chuan Lee, and prof. Shih-Chieh Chien, who provided me with burdenless jobs and decent

pays, so that I could survive the program for master’s degree without economic worries. This

thesis was also inspired a lot from Prof. Han-yu Huang’s courses about literary theories and

biopolitics, leading me to discover the issue of homelessness.

During my study, I also received mental support from my best friend Jimmy, who listened

to my complaints and the ups and downs in life. The administrative members in our department

office, Bartleby, Muhan, and William, all gave me a hand whenever I needed administrative

aids. Phoenix Chang was one of my mentors; I always felt relaxed when I was having small

talk with her. Kay Lee, a sunshine girl, we often shared the learning and use of Thai language

ii

and interesting things about Thailand. We shared bittersweets in life, too. When I was preparing

for the trip to London for a conference, Marshall Lin provided me with many suggestions

regarding the academic presentation and the travel routes. Last, my thesis would not have been

complete if there were no Do You A Flavor’s homeless projects and guided tours. I also have

to express my gratitude to Jia-ting Li, the social worker of Homeless Taiwan, for encouraging

me on her book launch event. I sincerely appreciate all the people around me, backing me up,

listening to me, and giving me useful advice. With the completion of this thesis, I will embrace

these treasures and embark on the next adventure.

iii

摘要

隨著《無家者——從未想過我有這麼一天》（2016）的出版，以及在 2017年開始

舉辦的「貧窮人的台北」等活動，無家者議題近幾年漸漸在臺灣受到重視。因受到社

會學領域的啟發，首先我將在此論文中探討喬治・歐威爾的《巴黎倫敦落魄記》中倫

敦的部分，藉此了解無家者的成因以及英格蘭貧窮法案的發展。接著我將以蔡明亮導

演的《郊遊》來討論臺灣的無家者議題，並比較無家者現象在臺灣與英國的異同。最

後，受到歐威爾「經營一座小型農場，或是一畦家庭菜園」提議的啟示，以及汲取在

二十一世紀由格蕾絲・李・博格斯和埃里克・歐林・賴特的社區發展理論等發想，我

將討論藉組織當地、互助的共同體以反抗資本主義的可能性。

以在地為基礎的共同體中，透過互相關懷與支持，將會產生愛與歸屬感的氛圍，

而人性也將成為可能。如同阿蘭・巴迪歐宣稱共產主義理念旨在將革命思想灌注於日

常實踐中，地方共同體的計畫也可以是彈性且滾動式進化的。本共同體營造計劃可被

視為實驗的過程，依據不同的時間與空間而有所調整。透過分析英格蘭與臺灣的無家

者議題，本論文將焦點置於人性以及人類本身，期望為這個存在已久的問題找到一個

可行的解決方案。

關鍵詞：無家者、共同體、人性、《郊遊》、《巴黎倫敦落魄記》、共產主義理念

iv

Abstract

With the publication of Life Stories of the Homeless in Taiwan (2016), and the serial

activities called “The Poor’s Taipei” launched in 2017, the issue of homelessness has recently

gained attention again in Taiwan. With such sociological inspiration, in my thesis, I will first

investigate the London part of George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, to

understand the cause of the homeless and the development of the Poor Laws in England. In the

next part, I will discuss the homelessness in Taiwan with Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray Dogs and

compare it with the homeless phenomenon in England. Finally, inspired by Orwell’s suggestion

of running a small farm, or a kitchen garden, plus the theory of community development

promoted by Grace Lee Boggs and Erik Olin Wright in the twenty-first century, I will discuss

the possibility of acting against the capitalistic oppression by organizing local and mutually-

supporting communities.

In the locally based communities, by caring and supporting each other, the atmosphere of

love and the sense of belonging will be established, and the humanity becomes possible. As

Alain Badiou claims that the Idea of communism intends to invest revolutionary ideas into

everyday practices, the proposal of local communities may also be flexible and evolutionary.

The community-building project can be seen as a process of experiment, adapting to different

time and space. By analyzing the homelessness in England and Taiwan, this thesis aims to find

a probable solution to the long-lasting question by focusing on human beings and humanity.

Keywords: homeless, community, humanity, Stray Dogs, Down and Out in Paris and

London, Idea of communism

v

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... i

Chinese Abstract .................................................................................................................... iii

English Abstract ...................................................................................................................... iv

Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... v

Chapter One: Introduction ..................................................................................................... 1

Chapter Two: Homelessness in Early Twentieth Century’s London:

Discussion on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London ......... 8

I. The Origin of the Workhouse in England ........................................................................ 12

II. The Workhouse as a Good Place ..................................................................................... 14

III. The Poor’s Attitude—in View of Religion .................................................................... 15

IV. The Poor Law—the Institution Putting the Disadvantaged under Control .................... 23

V. The Operation of the Workhouses .................................................................................. 27

VI. The Pre-Community Scheme ......................................................................................... 29

Chapter Three: Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs

and the studies on the homelessness in Taiwan ...................................... 32

I. Capitalism and Homeless Life .......................................................................................... 40

II. Political Allusions ........................................................................................................... 46

III. The Ontology of Life ..................................................................................................... 48

IV. Ruins and the Capitalistic Exploitation ......................................................................... 51

V. Repetition of the Plot ...................................................................................................... 56

Chapter Four: Sociological Theories of Community-building Schemes .......................... 60

vi

I. The Detroit Experience ..................................................................................................... 61

II. The Russian Revolution .................................................................................................. 62

III. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or the GPCR ............................................. 65

IV. Revolution in the Twenty-first Century ......................................................................... 66

V. The Sociological Theory of Community-Building Projects ........................................... 73

Chapter Five: The Community Hypothesis ......................................................................... 78

I. The Idea of Communism .................................................................................................. 79

II. Capitalism in literary works ............................................................................................ 80

III. Underlying problems of Capitalo-Parliamentarianism .................................................. 82

IV. Education ....................................................................................................................... 83

V. Humanity ......................................................................................................................... 86

VI. Community as the New Possibility of Communist Experiments .................................. 88

Chapter Six: Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 93

Works Cited ............................................................................................................................ 95

Nien 1

Chapter One: Introduction

Poverty is an old topic that has existed almost since the beginning of human history.

Among types of poverty, homelessness is one of the extremes. In the modern era, with the

progress of technology and amelioration of life quality, the homeless are still in our society.

Their looks sharply contrast with the landscapes in a city: dirty, filthy, sordid, and the like.

Ironically, in spite of their miserable lives, few active solutions are taken to solve the situation.

Even though welfare policies more or less exist in every state, and few benevolent people might

wholeheartedly care about this issue, the silhouettes of the tramps are still either visible on the

streets or hidden in the margin of a city.

The idea of investigating the homeless issue was partly inspired by a report made by

Public Television Service of Taiwan (PTS): The Stone Soup Project (Shitoutang jihua 石頭湯

計畫), in 2015. This project can be considered as a metamorphosis of the 318 Sunflower

Student Movement in Taiwan in 2014. The team initiated the Stone Soup project because

during the student movement, they saw homeless people who failed to receive enough food

supply while the students received more than what they needed. Therefore, Wu Yen-de (巫彥

德), Zhu Guan-zhen (朱冠蓁), and Zhang Shu-huai (張書懷) began to solicit donation of baozi

(包子, stuffed buns) for the homeless people around Longshan Temple in Taipei. After the

movement, they launched the monthly activity collecting donations of expiring food from

stores as ingredients to cook meals for the homeless people. They also launched the activity

called the Poor’s Taipei (Pinqiong ren de Taibei 貧窮人的台北) in cooperation with the guided

tour, Hidden Taipei (Jieyou 街遊), hosted by Homeless Taiwan Association (Mangcaoxin

xiehui 芒草心協會) and several related associations. Personally I also attended once as a

photographing volunteer when the activity first took place in 2017. By “travelling” through the

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most famous homeless spot around Longshan Temple, Wanhua, Taipei, and listening to several

homeless stories either shared by the association members or the tour guide who had been a

homeless person, I became interested into the homeless issue and was sure that the homeless

question needed to be probed and excavated.

These years in Taiwan, the books on homelessness have been published one after another,

aiming to rectify common stereotypes against the homeless, such as being dirty, lazy, immoral,

and so on. For example, in Life Stories of the Homeless in Taiwan (2016) (Wujiazhe—congwei

xiangguo wo you zheme yitian 《無家者——從未想過我有這麼一天》), the homeless stories

were individually collected through dictation to display their vivid characteristics. They are no

longer as plain as the rough sleepers we glance over on the roads, whom we might never have

a chance to talk with. Sun Ta-chuan (孫大川), in one of the recommendations, remarks that to

write stories for the homeless and paupers is to record the testimony and history for those who

are excluded from the norm in a society (9).

One of the books, If You Don’t Hand Out, How Long Will He Lie at Here? —A Struggle

and Tears of a Young Social Worker (2019) (Ni bu shenshou, ta hui zai zheli tang duojiu? –

yige nianqing shegong de zhengzha yu leishui 《你不伸手，他會在這裡躺多久？：一個年輕社

工的掙扎與淚水》) was written from the perspective of a social worker, Li jia-ting (李佳庭).

The bittersweets of homeless social work are laid out explicitly and poignantly. Indeed, the

homeless more or less do not know how to live well. For instance, they rarely possess essential

means and skills to earn money or they do not have the habit of saving money, and a portion

of them are alcoholic. As a social worker managing homeless cases, Li sometimes feels

helpless when she is faced with the stubborn and diehard homeless people. However, all of the

above are not the reasons to discriminate, for any social outcasts might be victims of miseries

in life, or of even graver institutional and structural problems in a society. At the end of this

book, Li emphasizes that the characteristics of the homeless are no difference from other people.

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The homeless also want to earn money as much as possible. They work odd jobs that can hardly

earn and save money for them, even though the working hours are long and they might have

been soaked in sweat after laboring. They will also be sick, and therefore need health care

service. Overall, their characters as human beings are not so different from other civilians, but

have to bear the stigmas and labels stuck on them. Ironically, they also discriminate each other

by claiming “I’m different from the other homeless people,” “I’ve never been a rough sleeper.

I’ve just slept in the shelter for three years,” “I’m a ‘high-class’ homeless person” and so forth

(296).

Above is either the testimony through interviewing the homeless or the social worker’s

working journal in twenty-first century’s Taiwan. We might expect the situation of the poor

has improved over the past century. However, through literary investigation, we get to realize

that once the homeless take to the roads, the miserable nomadic life will be no difference from

the homeless life of a century ago. Regarding the mindset, the homeless in 1930s’ England also

discriminated each other as those in today’s Taiwan. It is the coincidence of the homeless

phenomena makes the transtemporal and transnational comparison meaningful. In fact, these

phenomena were discovered and recorded in the work of incognito social investigation—Down

and Out in Paris and London (1933) composed by the literary master George Orwell, who also

composed celebrated Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). 1 He pays

attention to the labor issue in the Paris section, while homelessness is the focus in the London

section. In this thesis, I will discuss homelessness in modern era by making references to the

London section in Down and Out in Paris and London (hereafter Down and Out). As sociology

1 I prefer to investigate modern poverty through George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London mainly for the reasons that Orwell composed this fictionalized incognito social investigation in the early twentieth century, chronologically nearer to the present day than the times of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, etc., and that he also personally involved in the British colonial experiences in Burma and the Spanish War between the communist front and the fascist alliance. These key factors help broaden the scope to discuss the conflicts between capitalism and communism on the issue of homelessness. Profounder discussions will be laid out in this thesis.

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and the field of social work have found, the homeless today lead filthy and sordid lives and are

pervasively discriminated, either by people from upper classes or even inside the groups of the

homeless. Inspiring and interesting enough, this phenomenon has already been presented in

Down and Out. Through Orwell’s own observation and his conversation with the homeless

partners, he finds that the homeless are generally oppressed by the national power of ill-

established welfare institutions and the police system, both of which orient towards the

capitalistic ideology. In addition, the charity and reliefs from the religious service also fail to

complement the governmental insufficiency. The clergy described in this work seldom

sincerely care about the homeless’ needs. They want the homeless to show their faith to God

but ignore their physical conditions, which is basic. The unfriendly image of the Church and

the clergy in Down and Out might also be related to Orwell’s life experience, which will be

elaborated in Chapter Two.

In this thesis, the history of English poor laws and the development of workhouses will

also be investigated. It might be the national attitude of anti-idleness that shapes England as an

efficient and well-developed society, but meanwhile the lower orders are constantly produced,

kept out of “the norm,” and leading undesirable lives. Even though this is an incognito social

investigation, which might be as objective as possible, still the readers can find Orwell’s

meticulous arrangement of the selected contents. Through visiting different lodging houses and

casual wards, the ideal way of living in Orwell’s eyes gradually comes to light. At the end of

the London section, he finally proposes the community-like scheme to cope with the

uninhabitable and inhumane environments of the workhouses. This scheme can probably be an

inspiration when people are rethinking the possibilities of local community-building against

the overwhelming capitalistic trends of globalization, together with international money flow

which poses threats to the independency of a government’s sovereignty and people’s well-

being under it.

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The globality of homelessness can be found in the process of excavating the history in

Taiwan, too. In this thesis, I will also discuss the film, Stray Dogs (2013) as the locally-based

comprehension of the homeless question in Taiwan through investigating the history of

capitalistic development and political change of the sovereignties in Taiwan. Among the

regimes governing Taiwan, Japanese colonial government is the first and most direct factor

that molded Taiwan into a modern state, followed by Kuomintang from Mainland China. After

the westernization, industrialization, and urbanization under Japanese colonial reign, the

reasons for the appearance of the homeless and the oppressing juridical system became similar

to those in England. The misunderstanding of and discrimination against the homeless also

ensue. After Kuomintang came to Taiwan, the trend of pursuing economic success was further

reinforced, and money became common topics of politics in modern Taiwanese society.

However, in Stray Dogs, the material surplus is used to contrast the futility of the homeless life.

Through the deliberate layout of the scenes, the viewers might notice the boring and slow life

of the homeless in contrast with the weariness of the busy commuters shown in the film.

Slowness is the hallmark of Tsai Ming-liang’s full-length film. As usual, Stray Dogs is also

presented in the framework of slow time—the time as long as that in the real life. This anti-

commercial operation will make the film-watching experience nearly intolerable for the

viewers. In Chapter Three, the design of the time in the film and its relationship with the

homeless issue will be discussed.

When it comes to the image of the homeless in Stray Dogs, the discrimination is not

especially displayed. What is exhibited is their plain, yet boring and annoying, lives.

Regardless of the filthy image of the homeless family and the ruined buildings they live in, the

protagonist Lee Kang-sheng lives as other people in the city, Taipei, working, eating,

wandering, and relaxing. The director subtly buries the agonies of life in the presentation of

ruined but dwellable buildings, the hand-to-mouth way of living, and the noises of the

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construction sites and automobiles on the roads. I will play the role to fill the meanings in the

slow movie, contemplating the possible reflections on Stray Dogs. In connection with Kao Jun-

honn’s mural shown in this film, the artistic movements introduced and acted by the artist, Kao,

will also be borrowed to analyze the impacts that the capitalistic ideology brings about.

It is enlightening to find the commonality and universality between the homelessness in

England and Taiwan under the operations of nationalism and capitalism. Artists in Eastern Asia

launched several artistic movements to cope with the conspiracy between the international

enterprises and the local governments. In fact, Orwell also comes up with an idea to deal with

the destitute lives in the merciless capitalistic England. He already mentions the blueprint of

an ideal workhouse in Down and Out: With a kitchen and a small farm, the inmates are able to

stay lifelong in the facilities, work and eat together, and support each other. This tribe-like

living style is a reflection upon the devastating effects brought by the purely monetary

relationship in a capitalistic society, and can be looked upon as the third phase in the “tribe-

capitalism-community” development. This blueprint corresponds to the community-building

project promoted by Grace Lee Boggs based in the US. In 1970s, James and Grace Lee Boggs

commenced on thinking about the alternatives to the destructive power of capitalism when they

saw the economic recession in Detroit and numerous laborers became unemployed. In the

twenty-first century, Grace Lee Boggs continues to refine her philosophy of community-

building. By caring for the neighborhoods, holding regular artistic and educational activities,

physically and mentally supporting each other, etc., the connections among human beings are

not tied by monetary relationships but by love and humanity. James and Grace Lee Boggs’s

practice of community-building in the US can be categorized as the “socialism functional

compatible with capitalism” proposed by Eric Olin Wright. With the social and philosophical

discourses, the rethinking of socialist utopia again becomes plausible and practical, especially

when the communist countries are almost declared to have failed in the twenty-first century.

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To be more precise, the community-building scheme in the twenty-first century inherits

the spirit of equilibrium and humanity in Marxist communism, but denounces the static

communism adopted by the failed communist countries, such as USSR, North Korea, and

China. This thesis will briefly introduce Badiou’s deduction of communist China’s paradox,

which can serve as the apocalypse for Taiwan when we are thinking about the economic and

political future of this island.

The discourse regarding homelessness in literary studies is still rare in Taiwanese context.

Contrary to the rarity in academic sphere, the homeless are always visible in cities. This thesis

intends to bring out the commonly neglected issue before readers’ eyes, and hopes to make the

journey of investigation meaningful through further philosophical analyses. Furthermore, the

study on the economic minority is not only relevant to the homeless, but also related to the

overall welfare system of a society and the inherent topic of social safety net. Looking into the

literary works will help reimagine the humanity in the material and spiritual ruins left by the

capitalistic power of monstrous international enterprises and democratic parliaments at the

service of the capital giants. Even though the society in England and Taiwan might be richer

than before, poverty seems to be a permanent question that wants solutions. Only by anti-

discrimination and looking into the homeless’ lives and sufferings can we have access to reflect

on and rethink of the crucial yet long-ignored social challenge. The alternatives to the dead-

end capitalism will also disclose themselves through the textual analyses and sociological

theories and practice. This is also the significance of doing this research. I believe that the

interdisciplinary study between sociology and literature, and the transcultural comparison

between England and Taiwan can bring some new energy to the discussion of homelessness

and poverty.

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Chapter Two: Homelessness in Early Twentieth Century’s London: Discussion on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London

Down and Out in Paris and London (hereafter Down and Out) might at first glance be

regarded as a sociological study or a journalist report of the poor life in Paris and London, but

the reality might be far more complex than its appearance. Before George Orwell (deliberately)

began his down-and-out journey in Paris and London, he just came back to England in 1927

from Burma where he served for the Indian Imperial Police (George Orwell: A Literary Life

xvi, hereafter A Literary Life). Intentionally undergoing and experiencing the poor life in

London and in Paris, Orwell started pondering on the issue of the homeless and the laborers.

At first sight, Down and Out might be considered a work of social investigation; however, this

perspective can only be partially correct. As Orwell claims in “Introduction to the French

Edition” of Down and Out, he has “exaggerated nothing except in so far as all writers

exaggerate by selecting” (221). He does not “describe events in the exact order in which they

happened” but he claims that everything he describes does take place (222). Luke Seaber’s

finding is in consistence with Orwell’s own claim that this work is partly factual and partly

fictional. Orwell’s writing of incognito social investigation might be influenced by, or to say

inherited from, David Railton. Seaber finds that Railton’s pioneering writing of incognito

social investigation mixing “the personal and the social” in his writing style, was the

mainstream during 1920s and ‘30s (61-62). This writing style marks Railton’s difference from

the creator of the genre of incognito social investigation, James Greenwood, who tends to stand

at the impersonal and objective position to describe the situations of the poor whom he observes.

By using Railton’s ideas, Orwell further develops the genre of incognito social investigation.

Seaber contends that “Orwell’s text is strongly fictionalized, and this in terms of the genre of

incognito social investigation texts is rather rare” (65). At the beginning of his destitute life in

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London, Orwell makes inquiries about the cheap lodging houses from a tramp on the road.

However, Seaber claims that the lodging houses were well known for the contemporaries, even

including those who were not tramps, and the Rowton Houses were among the famous. That

is, Orwell as an author might be far more knowledgeable about how to survive as a tramp than

he pretends in this work as a narrator (Seaber 66).1 Far from being innocent, he even has

insight into the gender inequality among the homeless and cites the figures from an LCC

publication, finding that “at the charity-level men outnumber women by something like ten to

one” and “below a certain level society is entirely male” (213). The act of doing research on

the gender issue of the tramps excludes Orwell from the ignorant group of the objects observed

by him. Being a conscious investigator and a real tramp, Orwell is at the same time inside and

outside the frame of tramping life. By defining Orwell as a real/intended tramp and meanwhile

an incognito social investigator, instead of a mere observer, Seaber positions Orwell at the peak

of the genre of “Greenwoodian tradition,” arguing that Down and Out “cannot be surpassed,”

since Orwell has set the “boundary stone marking the genre’s end” (73).

Orwell’s life experience may give an account of his standpoint as a humanist, the lifelong

change from receiving the imperial education in England to distasting the politics of

imperialism in Burma and totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. In The Road to Wigan Pier,

published in 1937, Orwell remarks, “I hated the imperialism I was serving [as an Imperial

Police Officer in Burma] with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear” (Chapter 9).

Obviously, Orwell’s belief in patriotism and imperialism taught by St Cyprian’s School was

changed after the experience in Burma (A Literary Life 18). After serving in Indian Imperial

Police in Burma for five years, Orwell “returned to England fiercely anti-imperialist and anti-

1 Seaber argues that the lodging houses and “the existence of the Rowton Houses, created by Lord Rowton at the end of the nineteenth century to provide working men with a better option for accommodation” were commonsensical for those who have yet started tramping (66). The assertion implies that Orwell as a narrator exaggerates his ignorance when he tries to acquire the information about cheap beds from a navvy on the road (Orwell 199).

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racist” (A Literary Life 24). At that time, Orwell was probably a pro-communist. In fact, when

he went to Paris, he argued with his uncle, Adam Eugène, who had just come back from Soviet

Union and found there “instead of socialism, a future prison” (25). In the London part of Down

and Out, Orwell described a fight between two tramps: One misheard another saying

“‘Bullshit,’ which was taken for Bolshevik—a deadly insult” (205). This description connotes

that England pervaded an atmosphere of anti-communism. Orwell might remain unattached

from the anti-communist atmosphere around Western Europe, but he was suspicious towards

communism’s true colors and its feasibility. Orwell was disillusioned when he saw, in the

Spanish Civil War, the pro-Soviet Communist accusing “all the Trotskyist of being closet

fascists and counter-revolutionaries fighting for Franco”2 (Makovi 194). Orwell was also

concerned about the poor as if he were a public-choice economist3 when making comments

on the living environments of the lodging-houses in London, opining that “[i]f the authorities

are going to concern themselves with lodging-houses at all, they ought to start by making them

more comfortable, not by silly restrictions that would never be tolerated in a hotel” (220). This

comment is close to the “incentive structure” theory in public choice. The “incentive structure”

provided by institutions “promote consistent and predictable behavior,” and public choice

concerns about finding a way to solve the market failures by aligning the public officials’

private interest with the public interest (Makovi 184-85). In the case of the filthy lodging

houses, if the lodging houses provided the lodgers with better environment so that the lodgers

could regain their energy soon, pay more attention to their work, and repay more rental to the

lodging houses, the relationship between the proprietors and the lodgers would be a win-win

2 The accusation of Trotskyists as the fascists in Spain derived from the foreign policy of the POUM under Stalinist reign, whose government aimed to decrease Trotskyist influence in Spain, and decided reversely to eliminate some revolutionary power of the workers who are pro-Trotskyist, especially in Barcelona (Newsinger 44). 3 Public choice applied the economic model to the political realm, assuming that every individual is rational and will make choices and decisions in accord with their maximized interests; “bureaucrats strive to advance their own careers [,] and politicians seek election or reelection to office” (Shughart II). https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

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model. To sum up, with biographical research defining Orwell as a socialist, as well as anti-

imperialist, anti-communist, public-choice economist, plus his anti-capitalistic attitude in the

Paris part of Down and Out, then it is self-evident that Orwell is all in all an anti-totalitarian

socialist.

Even though Down and Out is a work of incognito social investigation infused with

intentional arrangement of the plots and personal comments, the pseudo-fictional part does not

eliminate the core value, humanity, which Orwell intends to convey. By defining him as an

anti-totalitarian socialist above, I argue that Orwell’s design of the plot in this work is

intentional. One of the evidences is the chronological inversion of Paris and London. In fact,

Orwell came back to London first to investigate the poor in 1928 and then went to Paris as a

dishwasher (Davison xvi). In this work, why does Orwell inverse the chronological order? It is

possible that he wants to create an atmosphere of going home from the foreign city, Paris.

England for Orwell was the “Paradise,” which Orwell imagines on the way “home”:

I was so pleased to be getting home, after being hard up for months in a foreign city [Paris],

that England seemed to me a sort of Paradise. There are, indeed, many things in England

that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly

cooked, brown bread, marmalade, beer made with veritable hops—they are all splendid,

if you can pay for them. (156)

However, the following scenes reveal that the poor London is another desolate world. The

building beside the Tilbury pier betrays Orwell’s dreamlike imagination. It is a hotel, “all

stucco and pinnacles, which stare from the English coast like idiots staring over an asylum wall”

(156). The implication of the London underclass and the intentional refusal to accept B’s

financial aid mark the onset of Orwell’s tramping life.4 The arrangement of the disillusionment

4 According to the context mentioned in Chapter XXI, B is Orwell’s friend who is responsible for finding jobs for Orwell.

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regarding the splendid London, or even entire England, paves the way for Orwell and the

readers to ponder on the issue of poverty and homelessness. In this chapter, I will first excavate

the historical development of the Poor Law, causing the desolate and sordid workhouses, or

the spikes, Orwell observed from 1927 to 1928. Next, I will discuss Orwell’s critiques, or his

personal comments on the tramping life. Orwell expresses his own opinions in terms of religion

and politics during his journey to poor London. He also shows his concerns about the

preventive police system and the problematic system of the workhouse. Near the end of Down

and Out, Orwell puts forth a solution to the question of poverty—to run a small farm, or a

kitchen garden in the workhouses; and such proposal contributes to today’s theory of local

economy and local community-building, which will be further developed in Chapter Four.

I. The Origin of the Workhouse in England

The phenomenon of poverty has existed since the earliest record of human history, as

Norman Longmate puts it that the pauperism is “as old as society itself,” but in England, the

governance over the poor commenced as late as sixteenth century (14). Brian Inglis points out

that in the Old Testament, Jesus “remarked that the poor are always with us;” in the Gospel of

John, Jesus rejected Judas’s idea of selling the expensive perfume and giving the money to the

poor (9). From the biblical perspective, no natural or divine law is laid down to put the poor

under command (Inglis 9). However, the disintegration of the monasteries caused by the Black

Death, the Enclosure Movement, and the Age of Discovery, to name a few, all gave rise to the

debut of the Poor Law in the sixteenth century until its end in the twentieth century. It might

be the social changes that propelled the English government to enact laws to cope with the

poverty and the lack of labor, and England was further developed into the welfare country that

we see nowadays. In the following, I will focus on the historical development and its impacts

on and consequences of the Poor Laws.

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According to Longmate’s historical survey in England, because of the Black Death, “the

dissolution of the monasteries in 1536 [by Henry VIII of England] disrupted” the supporting

system constituted by family, neighbors, and churches (14). The monasteries were in

responsible for assisting the poor, including “the very old, the very young, the sick, the crippled,

the blind and the insane” and the able-bodied poor who were out of work and got no income

(Longmate 14). To replace the supporting system provided by the monasteries, the intervention

from the government started in 1547 onwards. During the reign of Edward VI, the laws about

the poor were passed continually for several years (Longmate 14). The Poor Act of 1552

instructed the churches to provide the poor with accommodations, but also deterred the able-

bodied poor from being idle for over three days, or they would be “branded with a red hot iron

on the breast with the letter V” and be sentenced to be slaves “for two years” of those who

reported them as idlers (Longmate 14). Furthermore, the Poor Act of 1572 regulated that the

one who begged without a license, or “came from another parish [and] failed to wear ‘some

notable badge or token both on the breast and on the back of his outermost garment’, was to

suffer ‘burning through the gristle of the right ear’” (Longmate 14). It was not until the

Elizabethan Poor Law (officially “the 43rd Elizabeth”) consolidated in 1601 that the English

government started to prevent unemployment by providing them with work rather than

punishments (Longmate 15-17). Despite the fact that the Elizabethan Poor Law set the basis of

welfare legislation, focusing more on relieving the poor than punishing them, the Act of

Settlement and Removal of 1662, Longmate comments, was “possibly the worst law ever

passed by a British Parliament” (17). According to the law, if the paupers could not live in the

new parish for forty days without complaint from the locals, or could not prove they rented “a

property worth £10 a year,” they would be sent back to the parish they escaped from, or to the

last place where they had resided for over one year (Longmate 17). Although the statistic

showed that the “removals and associated legal expenses over the whole country cost

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£287,0005” in 1815, and although records showed that paupers were forced to part from their

family or familiar residential area, as late as 1907, there were still “more than 12,000 people

[being] removed each year” (Longmate 20-22).

In company with the Act of Settlement and Removal, the upper classes’ demand for

controlling over the paupers caused the embryo of workhouse to appear (Longmate 22).

Longmate sorts out that the New Workhouse set by a merchant called John Cary, in Bristol in

1698, was probably one of the first effective workhouses (23). This workhouse provided the

poor with clothes, beds, and “good nourishment” (Longmate 23). The description shows that

the workhouse is not like the ones later we know in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist or what

Orwell experienced in Down and Out. It is more similar to the private welfare institutes, not

the workhouses designated by the officials. With this huge contrast between the first workhouse

and the notorious later ones, it is worth probing the changes of the governor’s attitude and

scientific theory towards the poor through history.

II. The Workhouse as a Good Place

The origin of workhouse is not as dim as it appears in Down and Out. From John Locke’s

pamphlet A Report of the Board of Trade to the Lords Justices respecting the Relief and

Employment of the Poor (1697) to several bills followed, all aimed to find ways to provide the

poor with decent lives and employment (Longmate 25-26). In 1756, a workhouse in Nacton

Heath opened, and the poor came there “in a most miserable and filthy condition” (Longmate

26). In the workhouse, the poor were “shaved and cleansed thoroughly by washing in warm

water, and all new clothed throughout from head to foot” (Longmate 26). Longmate finds in

the record that “[m]any children […] are rendered useful” and “within four years £2,0006 had

5 About £21,812,000 in 2018. http://inflation.iamkate.com 6 £2,000 in 1760 is about £370,000 in 2018. http://inflation.iamkate.com

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been saved and the poor rates had been cut by half” (26-27). Similar condition occurred in

other workhouses in East Anglia, Suffolk and Norfolk, where the inmates were employed by

“making fishing nets and ropes or corn-sacks and plough-lines” (Longmate 27). One of the

reformers, Jonas Hanway, also urged the legislation in 1762 and 1767 respectively to lower the

death rate of the children in the workhouses, and the workhouses introduced the children to be

apprentices in factories (Longmate 28). In light of the historical record above, it appears that

the workhouse was not a horrifying place which accommodated the most miserable and

helpless paupers in the parishes. By establishing the workhouses, the poor and the parishes

were both benefited from lowering the poor rates and solving some part of the poverty.

III. The Poor’s Attitude—in View of Religion

In spite of the welfare the paupers received, the paupers, according to Longmate, were

“strangely ungrateful” (27). In 1765, a mob of paupers even destroyed one workhouse when

the parishes stopped paying the reliefs (Longmate 27). In addition, the reliefs aroused the

corruption among the “Overseers of the Poor” and the licensed traders, benefiting “those

grocers, bakers and shoemakers who sat on the vestry” (Longmate 35). Confronting the

problems, in 1818, the Rev. Robert Lowe “abolish[ed] out-relief and offer[ed] instead food and

shelter in the workhouse, where conditions were made so strict that soon all its former

occupants, apart from a dozen or so senile, sick or insane people with nowhere else to go, had

voluntarily moved out” (Longmate 45).

This implementation succeeded in cutting “the poor-rates by three-quarters,” leading to

the new form of workhouse which became the deterrent ones Orwell observed at the beginning

of the twentieth century, but the austerity simultaneously aggravated the exploitation of the

poor. Formerly the participants of charity were in suspicion of corruption by procuring the side-

benefits of the reliefs. Nonetheless, after the financial austerity of the workhouses, the charities

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were still a profitable trade in the early twentieth century. They were always able to squeeze

out the profits from the poorest. What was changed after the reform was the even more desolate

life of the homeless, constantly bullied and exploited by the privileged. In the Edbury spike,

the tramps “[can] get extra tea in the morning, as the Tramp Major7 [is] selling it at a halfpenny

a mug, illicitly no doubt” (Orwell 176). Another time in the Salvation Army, Orwell and Paddy,

one of his tramping fellows, buy a cup of tea which “appear[s] to be made with tea dust” (178).

Orwell guesses that it is “given to the Salvation Army in charity, though they sold it at three-

halfpence a cup” (178). The meal ticket is also a lucrative business. Before released from the

Romton spike, the tramps get tickets, which are “worth sixpence each,” but Orwell finds that

they can only get four penny-worth of food with a large tea and two slices for each ticket (172-

73). Orwell surmises that “the shop habitually cheat[s] the tramps of twopence or so on each

ticket” and comments that “having tickets instead of money, the tramps [can] not protest or go

elsewhere” (173). Once again on the Embankment, literally for the rough sleepers, Orwell gets

a ticket worth sixpence each from a clergyman (200). Likewise, the eating-house only gives

him “four penny-worth of food for each ticket” (200). Orwell once more criticizes that the

proprietor is swindling the tramps “to the tune of seven shillings or more a week” as “[t]he

clergyman [have] distributed well over a pound in tickets” (200). Orwell imputes this sort of

fraud to the malfunction of the welfare system: “This kind of victimization is a regular part of

a tramp’s life, and it will go on as long as people continue to give meal tickets instead of money”

(200). Even though replacing tickets with cash is still questionable, by experiencing as a tramp

himself, Orwell does detect the inadequacy of the system and the evil of human minds, which,

in this case, tend to be egocentric. The tickets distributed, albeit in the name of charity, are

always profitable for the people involved in the welfare deeds. To enact an effective policy,

7 Orwell explains that the Tramp Majors’ job “is to supervise casuals, and he is generally a workhouse pauper” when Orwell came to the spike (the Romton spike) for the first time (169).

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not only the interest from the perspective of the governments, but also the interest of the

homeless should be taken into consideration. For instance, if the homeless can acquire the

knowledge of how to use money properly when they get cash from the charity, then this

invisible advantage will be more influential than the sheer extent of physical needs. When it

comes to the lodging-houses, Orwell criticizes that it is because of the immense profitability

that the owners refuse to ameliorate the living conditions: “Any improvement would mean less

crowding, and hence less profit” (219-20). The examples shown in this literary work reveal the

inconvenient fact of the “poor business,” squeezing profits from every sphere of society,

including the miserable paupers. In spite of the amendments to the laws, the corruption among

the privileged and authorities does not cease. What brings to tramps and paupers is only more

suffering.

Apparently, the paupers, including Orwell, hardly pay respect to charity even at the most

desperate moment in life. They strive to preserve their dignity and do not show their humility

even after the welfare reformation makes the living condition unbearable and even destroys

their willpower. In Down and Out, Orwell mentions the tramps’ ungrateful attitude when they

receive the welfare from the churches. After staying overnight at a lodging-house in Bow,

Orwell travels to Romton to seek another casual ward to stay. At Romton he meets an old Irish

tramp8 (165). Since the spike will not open until six in the evening, to “[pass] the time away,”

the tramp leads Orwell to a place where they can get free tea from the church (166). In the “tin-

roofed shed in a side-street,” the tramps get the tea and bun from the “lady in a blue silk dress,

wearing gold spectacles and a crucifix” (presumably a nun) (166). In the meantime, the nun

starts to “[talk] upon religious subjects” (166). Nevertheless, Orwell claims that “we [hate] it”

(166). When the nun asks a tramp how long he has not knelt down and spoken with his Father

8 Most of the tramps Orwell encounters are Irish. According to Higginbotham, the Irish people enormously immigrated to England during the Great Famine. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/vagrants/index.shtml Web. 12 Jan. 2019.

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in Heaven, Orwell taunts that “his belly [answer] for him, with a disgraceful rumbling which

it set[s] up at sight of the food” (167). Most of the tramps are eager to leave that place as soon

as possible once they get their serving of tea, except for a “red-nosed fellow looking like a

corporal who [has] lost his stripe for drunkenness” (167). Orwell surmises that the man has

been in prison so he knows how to please the charity by saying “‘the dear Lord Jesus’ with less

shame” (167). The speculation reveals Orwell’s distaste for the juridical system and the

hypocrisy of the clergy. Putting the criminals, including the tramps and beggars at that time, in

jail will probably reinforce a man’s will to survive by any means unscrupulously instead of

getting liberal or vocational education which might help him socialize and start a new life. At

the end of this event in Chapter XXVI, one tramp shows his contempt for the church by

commenting that they have to “pay for” the tea and bun with the prayers which “[last] half an

hour” (168). This comment represents the mercantilism and commercialism permeated in every

stratum of English society, including the destitute. Partly since the discrepancy between the

charity and its recipients might be caused by the institutional insufficiency, and partly to

display the objectivity, at the last sentence of this chapter, Orwell speaks for the churches that

the religious group is not intended to humiliate the tramps, but the tramps are simply not

grateful to the clergy.9 Once more, in Chapter XXXIII, another religious scene again shows

the unfriendly and unapproachable religious congregation and the ungrateful vagabonds. A

group of “slummers,” including “a grave and reverend seignior in a frock coat, a lady sitting at

a portable harmonium, and a chinless youth toying with a crucifix,” appears in the kitchen of a

lodging-house “without any kind of invitation” (196). They hold a religious service, and the

lodgers pay no attention to them, on which Orwell makes a bitter comment that “it was a

pleasure to see how the lodgers met with the slummers”: “They did not offer the smallest

9 This comment shows Orwell’s complexity of double identity—simultaneously a real tramp with the subject “we” and an incognito social investigator (Seaber 70-71).

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rudeness to the slummers; they just ignored them” (196). Orwell mentions that the religious

congregation is so powerful that the officials cannot exclude it from the workhouse. He then

asserts, wryly, that “they [the clergy] have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon

as your income falls below a certain level” (197). On the same day, Orwell comes to a church

near King’s Cross Station with Paddy. Bozo, their tramp fellow, rejects, for he claims that

“churches were not his style” (197). The tramps come there also for the free tea. They also

ought to listen to the sermon after the tea. As always, the tramps do not attend the sermon.

Instead, they “lolled in their pews, laughed, chattered, leaned over and flicked pellets of bread

among the congregation” (197-98). Witnessing this, Orwell remarks, “we were frankly

bullying them,” but “[i]t was our revenge upon them for having humiliated us by feeding us”

(198). In the eyes of the helped, the church’s charity resembles more the trade between the

belief and the reliefs than the pure act of kindness. Seeing the ironic and unreasonable scenes,

Orwell’s emotion of anti-hegemony might be triggered by the “peaceful” violence derived from

the overbearing clergy towards the unwilling tramps.

Regarding Orwell’s attitudes towards religion, especially the Anglican Church, Peter

Davison provides explicit explanation and analysis in the article “Orwell—Religion and

Ethical Values.” From Orwell’s description of the school St. Cyprian in Such, Such Were the

Joys, written in 1947-48, Davison speculates that Orwell might have lost his faith in his teens.

In St. Cyprian, Orwell as little boy who kept wetting the bed inflicted corporal punishment

from the headmaster Sambo. Another time, a priest took his daughter to the garden party and

introduced that she wetted the bed, “and to underline her wickedness he had previously painted

her face black” (qtd. in “Orwell—Religion and Ethical Values,” hereafter “Religion”). Orwell

also describes the school to be expensive and snobbish. From his memoir about the school, it

is hard to say that the school left a joyous impression in Orwell’s life, especially concerning

the religion. In addition, Davison finds in Orwell’s letter to Eleanor Jacques, his lover, in 1932,

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that Orwell criticized the Church of England for being hypocritical, deceitful, and dishonest.

However, the Rev. Ernest Parker’s10 widow, Madge Parker, refused the idea that Orwell “was

not a genuine believer”, for they together “prepare[d] the sick to receive the sacraments” and

took care of the unemployed (“Religion”). Orwell even “developed an antipathy to religious

practice” (“Religion”). He opposed Christianity and “‘political Catholicism’ which he likened

to Communism as a form of nationalism” (“Religion”). Despite Orwell’s antipathy to religious

formality, Davison contends that Orwell “strongly believed that ‘the good of mankind is worth

fighting for’” (“Religion”). Davison also cites that “our job is to make life worth living on this

earth, which is the only earth we have” from Orwell’s declaration in “Reflections on Gandhi,”11

1949. In Davison’s view, no matter Orwell believed in God or not, he was deeply influenced

by the humanitarian aspect in the moral lessons taught by the religion.

In Down and Out, Orwell also exhibits his attitude through other tramps’ deeds regarding

the religion (for he as an author claims to be selecting the contents). Evidently, below a certain

level of society, the religion’s practical function is more prominent than its spiritual support.

The tramps take advantage of the religious items in exchange for what they need so as to

survive. For instance, the tramps smuggle money in the “papers,” or the Bible, to avoid

searching and confiscation before entering the spikes (Orwell 169). The “papers” are

considered sacred so they will not be searched. In other situations, the tramps might sell off

their bibles for more practical reasons. For example, Orwell’s friend, Paddy, cares more about

his appearance and has sold his papers. Orwell surmises that the caring of the appearance is to

gain respectability, even though “one [will] have known him for a tramp a hundred yards away”

(173). When it comes to nourishment, Paddy will go to the Church of England for reliefs,

despite the fact that he is a Catholic. His exclamation goes:

10 Orwell befriended with the curate when he taught in a high school in Middlesex (Brenman 33). 11 Orwell does not agree with some of the doctrines Gandhi holds and he dislikes the air of sainthood that Gandhi gives off, though, for he thinks at some point, the ascetism is inhuman. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/reflections-on-gandhi/

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Ah, what’d a man do widout religion, eh? I’ve took cups o’ tay from de convents, an’ de

Baptists, an’ de Church of England, an’ all sorts. I’m a Catholic meself. Dat’s to say, I

ain’t been to confession for above seventeen year, but still I got me religious feelin’s,

y’understand. An’ dem convents is always good for a cup o’ tay….

This passage exposes not the spiritual but the material console that the religion can provide for

a tramp (174). In comparison, the religious rites and sermons seem quite useless and suspicious

of putting the cart before the horse. The churches ask the tramps to keep their faith, but ignore

the even more complicated and influential issues about physical health and the knowledge to

work, to save money, and to lead a decent life, etc.

Other scenes show the variety among the tramps. Not all the tramps are nonchalant about

the faith. In the Salvation Army shelter, Orwell witnesses a “young clerk […] praying” and he

finds that the face of the clerk looks “agonised,” from which Orwell guesses that “he [is]

starving” (178). In the context, the clerks in the Salvation Army shelter are all “out of work,

pallid and moody” (178). This foreshadows that the clerks may be on the edge of taking to the

roads. Perhaps that young clerk implies the last grasp of faith before he reaches the point of no

return. Perhaps it means that faith can still be the last hope and spiritual support for those who

are unemployed and starving. On the contrary, Bozo refuses not only spiritual support but

material aid from the churches even though “it [is] rainy weather and he [is] almost penniless”

(197). He refuses the religious charities, saying “it stuck in his throat to sing hymns for buns”

(186). Orwell describes him as “an embittered atheist” and put in the parentheses that “the sort

of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally [Orwell himself] dislike Him”

(186). Bozo’s background is similar to Orwell’s, educated, back from India, having been in

Paris, and suspicious about religion. Possibly Bozo is a real character in history, but he seems

more to be the double of Orwell. Orwell might express his opinion through the character, and

the dialogue between them might be Orwell’s self-catechism about the role of religion in the

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lowest social stratum. Their suspicion of faith is different from other tramps. The former’s loss

of faith is ontological; the latter might seldom reflect upon the issue of religion, and the faith

goes hand-in-hand with money. The description at the beginning of the London part might

foreshadow the dark side of religion: “In Whitechapel somebody called The Singing Evangel

undertook to save you from hell for the charge of sixpence” (163). Judged from the tone of the

narrator, the belief in God might belong to those who have yet become social outcasts.

The development of Orwell’s attitude towards religion can be tracked down along with

his writing history. Down and Out was composed as early as 1930-31, when Orwell was back

from Burma, where he saw the brutal colonial government of England. It was composed before

A Clergyman’s Daughter in 1934, in which the “meanness and spite” of the “orthodox

Christianity” is displayed (“Religion”). Later on, in “The Prevention of Literature” in 1946,

Orwell draws an analogy between the formality of the religion and that of the communist party

(qtd. in “Religion”). In view of the later works, Orwell’s hatred to the formalism of religion

might be reinforced by his experience as a tramp in the workhouse, receiving the reliefs from

the churches. Furthermore, his disbelief in religion was mixed with the disbelief in and

disillusion to communism after he attended the Spanish Civil War during 1936-37, for both of

which imply certain hypocrisy and autocratic tendency.

The disbelief in the hypocritical religious and political groups, nevertheless, did not

destroy Orwell’s central idea to be a humanist. Although Orwell’s belief in Soviet Communist

Party was disillusioned in the Spanish Civil War, he did not give up the value of humanity and

equality in communism. He still held the value of “the good of mankind.” With this value in

mind, Makovi’s argument makes Orwell’s profile more complete that Orwell is actually a

public choice economist, who cares “moral, behavioral, and psychological equivalence

between public and private actors” (184). From Orwell’s critiques, Makovi finds that Orwell

objected to the centralized control of Soviet Union and Nazism (192-93). The former is

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communism in totalitarian form, while the latter is totalitarian capitalism. Therefore, with the

ideal of egalitarianism and anti-totalitarianism, Makovi finds that Orwell is more democratic

socialist than anti-communist or anti-capitalistic. Orwell’s such attitude can explain why he

always stands with the poor and the underprivileged against the exploitative authority. It is no

surprise that he chooses the first-person plural “we” in sentences: He is one of the tramps, such

as “We hated it [the sermon]” and “We ranged ourselves in the gallery pews and were given

our tea” (166, 197). Ostensibly, Orwell may “pretend” to be an incognito social investigator,

but with the discourse above, he does wholeheartedly care about the homeless, and rationally

analyze the laws, the police and the religious system that oppress them.

IV. The Poor Law—the Institution Putting the Disadvantaged under Control

When dwelling in the spikes, Orwell mentions several restrictions and disciplines

indicating the consequences of the Vagrancy Law in 1824 and the New Poor Law in 1834. In

fact, some of the rules were deduced from the old poor laws. For example, England has its

tradition of hatred for idleness long before the philosophy of Utilitarianism proposed by Jeremy

Bentham. Longmate finds that during the reign of Edward VI, anyone able to work but refused

to, “and live[d] idly for three days,” “should be branded with a red hot iron on the breast with

the letter V […]” (14).12 The workhouse in the nineteenth and twentieth century also followed

this pattern to deter the able-bodied paupers from flooding into the spikes. However, in

comparison with the lack of labor caused by the Black Death, in the nineteenth century the

reason became the issue of overpopulation. Kenneth Morgan proves that the old poor law faced

pressure from the statistics of population in England and Wales, finding that the population

grew from 7.9 million in 1781 to 14 million in 1831 (62). In addition, partly influenced by the

12 Peter Higginbotham indicates that the attitude of anti-idleness and the urge of labor force resulted from the Black Death in 1348-9. http://www.workhouses.org.uk/vagrants/index.shtml Web. 12 Jan. 2019.

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enclosure movement, the industrialization, and the insufficient harvest, the poor rate increased

almost threefold from 1792 to 1812 in England and Wales (Morgan 62). In the meantime, the

Malthusian principle of population also influenced the economists, including David Ricardo,

John Ramsay McCulloch, and John Stuart Mill, to believe that abolishing the reliefs would

possibly limit the number of the poor people (Inglis 219-20, Morgan 64). Morgan mentions

that Ricardo even proposed to abolish the poor law entirely according to the theory of free

market: Everyone had to compete equally without governmental intervention (64). On

discussing the issue of poor law, Morgan finds that in the Royal Commission, which was set

to investigate the operation of the poor law, two central figures “Edwin Chadwick and Nassau

Senior” “were strongly influenced by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham” (65). It was effectivity and

accountability that Bentham and his followers pursued. In spite of the good intention to pursue

the efficiency in the welfare institutions, the process of data-collecting was not prudent enough.

Morgan finds that the evidence was barely gathered to prove that the underemployment

resulted from welfare system which intended to decrease poverty (65). Adopting the imprecise

investigation made by the Royal Commission, the Whig government embarked on making the

Victorian New Poor Law (Longmate 107, Morgan 66). Morgan classifies fourfold regulations

of the New Poor Law:

First, central government became involved in the operation of poor relief for the first time

[…]. Second, Poor Law Guardians were now to be elected by local ratepayers and

property owners; they replaced the previous unelected overseers of the poor. […] Third,

parishes were grouped into unions and the Act stipulated that workhouses could be built

if the unions wanted them. […] Fourth, the link between central government and the

provinces was provided by appointing assistant commissioners to check the operation of

the new system. (67)

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Morgan remarks that the disciplines in workhouses and the education of the poor children were

barely mentioned (67). He also remarks that this was the first time that the government

attempted to put the paupers and poor relief under national control (67). Even though an Irish

tramp introduces the cocoa spikes, the tea spikes, and the skilly spikes to Orwell, he finds that

the spikes in Cromley, Romton, and Edbury are all alike (166, 203). Indeed, some spikes are

praised to be comfortable, but Orwell’s tone is ironic. “Chelsea was said to be the most

luxurious spike in England; someone, praising it, said that the blankets there were more like

prison than the spike,” Orwell writes (169). The readers really do not know whether to laugh

or to cry; however, the case is the exemplum that conforms to the nationalization and

systemization of the workhouses, equipped with similar filthy bedding and unhealthy

nourishment.

Along with English government’s capitalistic tendency, the anti-communist trend and

even anti-socialist attitude in England can be discovered in Orwell’s work. When Bozo talks

about his screeving, or pavement drawing, style, he mentions:

[…] when the Budget13 was on I had one of Winston trying to push an elephant marked

“Debt”, and underneath I wrote, “Will he budge it?” See? You can have cartoons about

any of the parties, but you mustn’t put anything in favour of Socialism, because the police

won’t stand it. Once I did a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked Capital swallowing a

rabbit marked Labour. The copper came along and saw it, and he says, “You rub that out,

and look sharp of it,” he says. (182)

This passage shows twofold of the powerful English government, the law and the capitalistic

tendency. It also reveals how powerful the English police are. They can command the tramps

on the roads to leave if they want, and the reason of expelling is entwined with the ideology of

13 Indicating the “People’s Budge” passed in 1910

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capitalism and utilitarianism. The tramps are thought to be unproductive, so their lives are

presumably valueless and their right of staying on the roads can be easily deprived.

With regard to the law, Orwell does observe the weird phenomenon in England that

begging is not allowed while begging by pretending to sell something is allowed. He explains

the reasons of the beggars’ strategy of pretending:

The reason why they have to pretend to sell matches and so forth instead of begging

outright is that this is demanded by the absurd law about begging. As the law now stands,

if you approach a stranger and ask him for twopence, he can call a policeman and get you

seven days for begging. But if you make the air hideous by droning ‘Nearer, my God, to

Thee’, or scrawl some chalk daubs on the pavement, or stand about with a tray of

matches—in short, if you make a nuisance of yourself—you are held to be following a

legitimate trade and not begging. (190)

The phenomenon is obviously caused by the latent ideology of anti-idleness passed down from

the end of the Middle Ages, and the result might be the meaningless and futile labor presented

in the description above.

The legacy of the Act of Settlement and Removal presents itself in the form of workhouses

and casual wards in the twentieth century. Near the end of his tramping life, Orwell admits that

“[i]t is queer that a tribe of men, tens of thousands in number, should be marching up and down

England like so many Wandering Jews” (211). He alleges that it is “because there happens to

be a law compelling him [a tramp] to do so” (211-12). Orwell elaborates that “if he [a tramp]

is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward

will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving” (212). Historically, this

circumstance resulted from the Casual Poor Act of 1882 (Higginbotham). The act might be the

heritage of the Act of Settlement and Removal of 1662. In the period of industrialization and

the urbanization, the removal from parishes was replaced with the tramping activities among

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different districts within the metropolis. This kind of law was probably enacted to prevent not

only idleness but also cozy accommodation, but its outcome was, as Orwell criticizes, inhuman

residential environments of the workhouses and demoralizing effects on the homeless.

V. The Operation of the Workhouses

The new system of workhouse can be attributed to the New Poor Law (Morgan 68).

Irrelevant to the name of the Poor Law itself, however, workhouses were set to take care of the

mentally or physically challenged and orphans rather than the poor, and the vagrants were

thought to be the responsibility of the police14 instead of the welfare institutions (Morgan 68,

Higginbotham). The tramps thus could only claim out-door reliefs or in case of urgency, get

accommodation for “a task of work” (Higginbotham).15 The workhouses are mostly prison-

like, with bad ventilation, and separated into several wards in accordance with the physical

characteristics, such as age and genders, or diseases of the inmates (Morgan 68, Higginbotham).

Orwell also makes it clear that one of the spikes is prison-like “with its row of tiny, barred

windows, and a high wall and iron gates separating it from the road” (168). The regulations

about the provision of nutrition in the workhouses are also inconceivable. Orwell records that

“[t]he wastage was astonishing and, in the circumstances, appalling” (208). At the Lower

Binfield spike, he witnesses that “[h]alf-eaten joints of meat, and bucketfuls of broken bread

and vegetables, were pitched away like so much rubbish and then defiled with tea-leaves” (208).

He hears from the paupers that the wastage comes from the “deliberate policy” (209). Orwell

does not further explain the reasons. The law might be enacted to ensure the hygiene, because

14 David Garland finds that Patrick Colquhoun (1745-1820), a magistrate, is the first person who came up with the idea of “preventive form of regulation” (31). The preventive regulation may have influenced the legislation of the New Poor Law, in which the tramps, vagabonds, and rogues are put in the same category. 15 The place where the tramps went to was called casual wards, a part of workhouses, and some of the tramps accordingly are also called the casuals, different from workhouse “inmates.”

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the secreted food might decay and do harm to the inmates’ health (Archbold 23). However,

whether the policy is used to prevent stealing and selling is also suspicious.

Other than the filthy spikes, the clean Salvation Army shelters for Orwell are not sufficient,

either. The Salvation Army shelters are highly disciplined, in which “cooking, drinking,

spitting, swearing, quarrelling and gambling” are prohibited (177). Orwell also thinks of the

Salvation Army shelters as clean but “far drearier than the worst of the common lodging-houses”

(178). Their dormitory is like “a barrack room, with sixty or seventy beds in it” (179). Orwell

even comments:

They [the Salvation Army shelters] are certainly cheap, but they are too like workhouses

for my taste. In some of them there is even a compulsory religious service once or twice

a week, which the lodgers must attend or leave the house. The fact is that the Salvation

Army are so in the habit of thinking themselves a charitable body that they cannot even

run a lodging-house without making it stink of charity. (179)

The workhouse taste might be relevant to the rules “prohibiting cooking, drinking, spitting,

swearing, quarrelling and gambling” (177). The Salvation Army shelters are even less energetic

than those workhouses. In a nutshell, the charity and workhouses in London are not humane

enough for Orwell. He opposes to the dirtiness, because of which he even mentions twice that

he leaves “unwashed,” shunning away from the dirty basins and towels (160, 171). 16

Nevertheless, he also opposes to the overly clean Salvation Army shelters without vitality.

Orwell does not advocate the tidy street views in London. He criticizes that London after Paris

is “cleaner, quieter, and drearier” (162). Even though Paris is “the land of bistro and the

sweatshop” (italic in the original), Orwell seems to admire its prosperity. As Benjamin analyzes

the porosity of the city, Paris may be a place mixed with urban design from the governments

and the natural development of the commercial arcades. Inside the porous arcades, the

16 The first time in a charged lodging-house. The second time in the Romton spike.

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commercial activities are allowed to develop vividly and flexibly. On the other side, controlled

by the strict Poor Law and the Vagrancy Act, London presents itself as a tidy but inhuman city

for the poor or the homeless. Higginbotham finds that in the new Vagrancy Act in 1824, anyone

who was found begging, or squatting “in any deserted or unoccupied Building, or in the open

Air, or under a Tent […] [were] liable to up to three months hard labour” (“Tramps and

Vagrants”). The finding corresponds to Orwell’s investigation in London, where the police

could expel and even arrest the tramps, or the wanderers, according to this law. In fact,

Vagrancy Act 1824 still exists in England, while Scotland already repealed it in 1982,

especially Section 4: Persons committing certain offences to be deemed rogues and vagabonds,

“and implemented additional legislation to deal with antisocial and criminal behaviour”

(Greenfield and Marsh). The remaining and enforcement of the law keeps persecuting the

underprivileged and thus arouses controversies whether to abolish it or not.

VI. The Pre-Community Scheme

In the early twentieth century, the workhouse appeared to have lost its function of

employment and acceptable accommodation. Originally the workhouse, as its name suggests,

aimed to put the idlers at work. As mentioned before, since the lack of labor caused by the

Black Death in the sixteenth century, England has had its custom of anti-idleness, which

resulted in the workhouses which Orwell experiences during his investigation. However,

contrary to workhouse’s original ideals, the lodgers are simply kept busy but actually doing

futile jobs, such as peeling the potatoes or chopping the wood, leaving other time in suffocation

of boredom. Orwell criticizes that the work is “a mere formality” to keep the tramps occupied

(172). In the Edbury spike, there is even “no work to do” (176). What is worse, malnutrition

caused by the bad food provided in the workhouses or provided by the food tickets, the

homeless’ mental and physical health is severely destroyed. As Orwell comments on one of his

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tramp friends, Paddy, he is not natively despicable, but it is the malnutrition that have

“destroyed his manhood” (176).

By investigating the physical and mental rottenness on the rough sleepers and in the

workhouses, Orwell precisely perceives the basic physical needs of the homeless. In the

passages describing the discrepancy between the charity’s original intentions and the homeless’

reactions, the readers may find that the physical needs should be taken care of before the needs

of faith. However, the governments and the legislators did not take the paupers’ living

circumstances and their mindset into consideration when ideas about workhouses and reliefs

were come up with, which caused the disagreement between the givers and the receivers to

occur. Let’s take a look at Maslow’s theory of needs, which will make the discourse more

explicit. Until 1943, Maslow theorized the hierarchy of needs, explaining human beings’

different level of needs. This theory asserts that physiological needs should be satisfied before

one can satisfy his/her needs of safety. Once the safety needs are satisfied, one reaches the level

to satisfy the needs of belonging and love, then esteem, and finally self-actualization (Saul

Mcleod). In this sense, putting the lodgers of workhouses in the condition of malnutrition, the

law makers and the officials were in fact destroying the basic need of human beings—the

physiological need. The police and law system as a whole further destroyed the need of safety

by putting the homeless into prisons for tramping or begging on the roads. No wonder the

homeless fail to feel the love that the church aims to address in the case of Down and Out. Not

to mention the needs of love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization that the homeless could

never reach under the inhuman system.

Confronting this kind of thanatopolitics in London, Orwell proposes the scheme to “run a

small farm” in the workhouses (215). In fact, in the second chapter of the London part—

Chapter XXV, Orwell already embeds his ideals of a home-like place in the descriptions of the

lodging-houses. Orwell once stays at a lodging-house in Pennyfields. This lodging house

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contains a kitchen “common to all lodgers, with free firing and a supply of cooking-pots, tea-

basins and toasting-forks” (161). The fire in the kitchen is always on. The lodgers take turns to

tend the fire, sweep the kitchen, and make the beds (161). There is even an “arbiter of disputes

and unpaid chucker-out,” called Steve. Orwell claims that he likes the kitchen. The lodgers will

gather in the kitchen, waiting for their laundry, playing chess and card games, and singing. The

lodgers even share the food with each other for “it [is] taken for granted to feed the men who

[are] out of work” (161-62). The observation in the lodging-house of Pennyfields probably is

the prototype of a perfect mutual-help community in Orwell’s mind. Further on, when he

reflects on the sordid and desolate workhouses, the proposal of community-building is thus

conceptualized: By planting in the gardens and cooking in the kitchen of the workhouses, the

paupers can work properly for a day and by which the lodgers can be well-fed (215). As Orwell

observes that the paupers’ will can be destroyed by malnutrition, to feed the starved becomes

the first step to change the desolate situation. Orwell further elaborates that the casual wards

ought not to force the paupers to keep moving vainly and he hopes the workhouses will

“develop into partially self-supporting institutions” (216).

Without a doubt, the ultimate aim of Orwell’s ideal is to cease the paupers’ destitution,

and the paupers can even “marry and take a respectable place in society” (216). The idea of “a

small kitchen” might come from the Western tradition in which the hearth is the heart of a

home, and home is the basic support for individuals. This is also why Orwell reversed the

chronological order of this work, because feeling at home is almost a common human nature

and also the departure of humanity. Orwell admits that “[t]his is only a rough idea,” but from

the eye in the twenty-first century, he is actually proposing a scheme similar to community-

building that the philosophers, such as Grace Lee Boggs, also promote in order to counterattack

the ruins-producing free trade of capitalism (216). In the twenty-first century today, the fight

against poverty is still ongoing.

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Chapter Three: Tsai Ming-Liang’s Stray Dogs and the studies on the homelessness in Taiwan

Orwell’s words are not only revelatory for the twentieth century’s England but also for

other parts of the world under the trend of westernization and globalization. The origin of the

homelessness between England and Taiwan is different; the homeless of the former originated

from the Black Death and the dismiss of the monasteries, while those of the latter arose from

the migrants from Mainland China to Taiwan and the immigrant policies commanded by Qing

Dynasty. However, the development of the homeless in Taiwan under Japanese reign during

1895-1945 highly resembles the nationalizing and institutionalizing process in the nineteenth

century in England. Both of the two regimes intended to put the poor and the homeless under

national control. Supposedly, the governments all want to decrease the number of the poor, but

neglecting the interests and needs of the paupers and classifying them as the social scums might

make the welfare policies constantly fail. With the industrialization, the homeless seem to

proliferate because of the urbanization, and in the execution of urban planning, they are often

seen as social villains, penned up and juridically thrown away from the sight of the urbanites.

The governments modularize the homeless as the ruffians in order to rule the cities efficiently,

but this process also causes the labelling and stigmatization of the homeless. Unfortunately,

this stigmatization, such as dirtiness, laziness, criminality, to name a few, still permeates in the

twenty-first century regardless of the fact that the modern world is materially progressive. The

material surplus does not flow to the people in need, but ironically reflects the miseries of the

destitute, whose lives do not change in comparison with the homeless one hundred years ago.

Between the world of material surplus and that of extreme poverty, apparently there is an

abysmal gap. To understand the gap and to complement the discrepancy, it appears imperative

to investigate the historical and institutional elements that cause the homeless to appear and

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exist in modern context. In this situation, realizing more about the situation of the homeless

may help destigmatize them and fill meanings into the gap between materially rich world and

the impoverished one.

The homeless in London and those in Taiwan have many traits and causes in common,

which makes the transnational and transcultural comparison meaningful. In Down and Out, the

homeless, who came to London to find jobs with the industrial development and the

phenomenon of urbanization, were persecuted by the pro-capitalistic laws and police system. I

deem this as a hinge to connect England and Taiwan, which also underwent the process of

westernization during Japanese colonial era and Kuomintang’s reign. The industrial and

juridical westernization made Taiwan a shade of England, and so were the homeless. Through

literary and historical investigation, the truth of the enigmatic homeless phenomenon in

England and Taiwan might be revealed, and in realizing the commonality of the homeless in

the world, the localized solution that can be applied globally—the community-building scheme,

initiated by Orwell—become possible.

In this Chapter, I will discuss the homelessness in Taiwan through Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray

Dogs (2013). Historically, the phenomenon of homelessness in Taiwan can be traced back to

Qing Dynasty, and this issue recently has been gained attention again. Chronologically the

homeless issue was firstly shown in artistic form with the release of Stray Dogs, featuring Lee

Kang-sheng as a homeless father. In this movie, the father as a homeless man leads a slow and

simple life, unwillingly. The same as the father’s slow life, the form of the movie also belongs

to the category of slow movies, without gorgeous storyline as in other commercial movies.

After the release of this film, Tsai has even cooperated with Zenan Homeless Social Welfare

Foundation (Renan shehui fuli cishan shiye jijinhui 人安社會福利慈善事業基金會, established

in 2002) to raise money for the homeless since 2014. As if it were a trend, in these years, several

publications regarding homeless issues appeared and activities leading people to realize the

homeless more and help them were also launched. For example, Life Stories of the Homeless

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in Taiwan (Wujiazhe—congwei xiangguo wo you zheme yitian 《無家者——從未想過我有這

麼一天》), recording the homeless’ testimony of their lives, was published in 2016. Another

book, If You Don’t Hand Out, How Long Will He Lie at Here? —A Struggle and Tears of a

Young Social Worker (Ni bu shenshou, ta hui zai zheli tang duojiu? –yige nianqing shegong de

zhengzha yu leishui 《你不伸手，他會在這裡躺多久？：一個年輕社工的掙扎與淚水》), written

from the perspective of the social worker, Li jia-ting (李佳庭 ), was published in 2019.

Furthermore, the serial movements called “The Poor’s Taipei” (Pinqiongren de Taibei 貧窮人

的台北) were launched in 2017 by NGOs such as Learning from the Poor (Xiang pinqiongzhe

xuexi xingdong lianmeng 向貧窮者學習行動聯盟), Dream City Building (Taiwan mengxiang

chengxiang yingzao xiehui 台灣夢想城鄉營造協會), Do You a Flavor (Rensheng baiwei 人生

百味), etc. To further elaborate the phenomenon of homelessness and its latent meaning, this

chapter will first investigate the historical contexts of the homeless in Taiwan, followed by the

revelation of political and economic metaphors hidden in the film, and finally focus on

examining the concept of nature, boredom, and emptiness the film intends to convey.

The historical record of the homeless in Taiwan can be traced back to Qing Dynasty, when

the proper noun “Lohankha” (羅漢腳) appeared, meaning a man without a family, a house, and

even a job. In history, during the reign of Yongzheng (Yung-cheng) Emperor, to control the

price of rice is one of the reasons that the Qing government limited immigration to Taiwan

(Chuan 293-301). The rice price in Taiwan during the reigns of Kangxi Emperor and

Yongzheng Emperor was lower than that in provinces Zhejiang, Fujian, or Guangdong. In the

years of harvest, foods in prefectures Zhangzhou and Quanzhou could serve for only six

months. For the other six months, people in the two prefectures needed to depend on the foods

imported from Taiwan (Chuan 24). Owing to the insufficiency of foods, people in the coastal

provinces chose to emigrate to Taiwan, which led to the increase of population and the inflation

of rice price in Taiwan. In addition to the economic reason of the rice price, the emigrants often

communicated with Chinese emigrants in Luzon and Kelaba (i.e. Jakarta), who were often

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thought of as the traitors of China (Chuan 28). There was no surprise that Yongzheng Emperor

did not believe in Taiwanese people. For the economic and political factors, Yongzheng

Emperor limited Chinese people to emigrating to Taiwan. Nevertheless, this restriction failed

to restrain the residents in Fujian and Guangdong from illegally emigrating to Taiwan,

especially the poor, who did not have homes or decent jobs in their hometown. In this situation,

they were more likely to take the risk of crossing the strait to Taiwan.

After coming to Taiwan, the Lohankhas usually took part in fights among different ethnic

backgrounds in Taiwan. They were also apt to be swindled by the local ruffians to commit

crimes. In Tan-hsin Archives, a Cantonese homeless named Wen Long-bo was tempted by a

local ruffian, Lin Hwan, to occupy the manor (Ai 隘) to rob the local people of the rent (No.

17302-8, No. 17302-18). In Life Stories of the Homeless in Taiwan, one of the homeless also

claimed, “without robbing, stealing, or begging, the homeless are destined to die” (126). In this

book, another homeless man was lured to sell his newly donated clothes worth NT 2000 dollars

for NT 200 dollars (209-10). With the examples from Qing Dynasty to modern Taiwan, even

though the homeless’ nature is not evil, they are easily used or manipulated by people with

malicious intentions under the circumstance with narrow choices. The number of Lohankhas

was slightly relieved after the homeless were sent back to Mainland China during Japanese

reign in Taiwan (Tai).

Despite the decrease of Lohankhas, while the agrarian society moved towards the

industrial one, the number of the homeless was inevitably on the increase. Originally sheltered

in the countryside villages whether the human relationships were tight, the laborers were forced

to flood into the metropoles where the job opportunities were more and the pays were better.

In such process of industrialization and urbanization, those who fail to find a residence to settle

down become the homeless. In fact, as George Orwell describes in Down and Out in Paris and

London, with regard to the prevalence of the homeless, the situation of England bears a

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resemblance to that of Taiwan1. The publication year of George Orwell’s Down and Out in

Paris and London is about the same time when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. During the

period of Japanese reign, the government executed the systematic urban projects. From the

perspective of urbanization, it is predictable that the homeless did not disappear even though

the Japanese government repatriated some of them to Mainland China. The cities attract new

settlers. When the new comers fail to settle down, they will become the homeless. However, it

is hard to find numeral evidences in historical records, which partly proves that the homeless

are always on the periphery of a society. Even though in the population censuses carried out

by the Japanese colonial government, the occupations, including the unemployed, were

investigated2, the numbers still cannot show the reality of the homeless. It is obvious that the

homeless are not necessarily unemployed and the unemployed are not necessarily homeless. In

addition, to understand the status quo of the homeless is not one of the purposes of the

population investigation. Lin Pei-hsin categorized seven reasons of the censuses: to understand

the ethnic groups in Taiwan, the genealogy of family relationships, the languages and dialects,

the educational levels, the bodily and mentally challenged, the opium smokers, and the

occupations. As shown above, none of the reasons is exactly related to the situation of poverty

and homelessness. Knowing the occupations helps realize social and economic structure, which

benefits the colonial governing (Lin 102-6). The homelessness was not taken into consideration

of the census probably because the homeless were not so numerous to the extent that attracted

the governments’ attention. The Japanese colonists set up the welfare institutes, such as Jinsaiin

(仁濟院) in Taipei, Jikeiin (慈惠院) in Hsinchu, Taichung, Tainan, Chiayi, and Kaohsiung, and

Fusaiin (普濟院) in Penghu almost for the purpose of taking care of the orphans, elders,

physically-challenged instead of the able-bodied homeless (Chen 233-37). Without the census

1 This has been discussed in Chapter Two. 2 Take the investigation in 1898 for example. In Taipei, there were 5,947 males and 3,614 females unemployed (Taiwan Database for Empirical Legal Studies, National Taiwan University). In the population census in 1915, there were 2693 males and 1891 females unemployed or occupation-unavailable in Taipei (Historical Demography, Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica).

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about homelessness at hand, private social welfare institutions might serve as an alternative to

understand the phenomenon of the homeless. Take Aiai Ryou (愛愛寮) in Monga, Taipei, for

example. The Taiwanese young administrator, Shih Ch’ien, as an official, saw the miserable

beggars on roads when investigating the situation of the poor in Monga area, and thus “founded

Aiai Ryou all by his own” in 1923 (Aiai Ryou official website). The founding of Aiai Ryou

proves that there were still the homeless and the impoverished in Taiwan’s society during

Japanese reign even though a portion of the Lohankhas had been repatriated to Mainland China.

Reviewing historical data, Liou Yaw-hwa observes that the Japanese government

implemented seventy-two urban plans in Taiwan. Taipei is chronologically second to Taichung

as the target of urban renewal started both in 1900. Taipei and Taichung are also the cities

where the scenes of Stray Dogs are located. Monga, where Aiai Ryou was set, was also a

district in Taipei and now is called Wanhua. Taipei was planned to contain six hundred

thousand citizens. The population in Taipei also skyrocketed from 69,672 in 1900 to 313,152

in 1940 (Liou). Apparently, the city Taipei was undergoing urbanization under Japanese reign.

The emergence of Aiai Ryou and the urban plan prove that the homeless was a serious social

problem as the Japanese government was aware of it. According to Shen De-wen, he argues

that it was during the Japanese reign that the homeless were put into regulation by the state

apparatus. In 1906, the Rule of Controlling the Vagabonds in Taiwan (Taiwan hurousha

torishimari kisoku 台灣浮浪者取締規則) was enacted (88). The homeless were imprisoned

either at Karuruan or on the Island of Fire, which were remote from their hometown, or the

cities. The traffic of the camps for the homeless was not convenient at that era; therefore, the

effect of separating the homeless from the so-called “normal people” was achieved. Shen De-

wen, in the article “The Lament on the Taiwanese Fu-Lang-Zhe [Vagrants] on the edge of the

Island” (“Taiwanren fulangzhe de daoyu bianyuan beige” 〈台灣人浮浪者的島嶼邊緣悲歌〉),

gives us further explanation that why the homeless were regulated. From his viewpoint, Shen

considers that the regulation system was closely related to Western nationalism, which aimed

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to marginalize those who violated the nationalist agenda. By categorization, those who did not

fit in nationalism would be stigmatized as pathological. The pathological included the criminals,

the homeless, and the political offenders, all of whom were considered to be patients or pests

to the society. Since the nineteenth century, the boundary between the morally ill and the

material insufficiency has been blurred.3 If one is poor, it is inevitable that he or she is

connected to the concept of crimes or moral deficiency. Shen also claims that the Japanese

regulation of the homeless in Taiwan is a process of westernization from barbarism to

civilization. The process can be divided into four periods: the pioneer period (1906-1908), the

interim period (1908-1920), the transitional period (1920-1928), and the mature period (1928-

1943) (93-97). After the history is surveyed, the homeless regulation in Taiwan under Japanese

rule, the westernization of the law system, and the mode of including the homeless into

regulation are becoming more salient. According to Hsueh Hua-yuan, the Japanese law on

vagabonds was finally developed into the Gangster Prevention Act during the Period of

National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion (Dongyuan Kanluan shiqi

jiansu liumang tiaoli 動員戡亂時期檢肅流氓條例) under Kuomintang’s ruling. The law in the

Japanese reign was enacted for crime prevention; those who violated the law would be put into

prison, and this intention was also inherited by the law during Kuomintang’s reign. Hsueh Hua-

yuan considers that the law to be against human rights inasmuch as it violated part of the

Criminal Code of Republic of China (212). The law was accordingly announced against the

Constitution in 2008.

From the historical survey, it comes as no surprise that the homeless were often connected

with the gangsters. The homeless have often been related together in the cases of crime control,

for their underprivileged situation often makes them be tempted by and fall victim to the rogues.

Even though they are not evil themselves, whom were not born or taught to harm the other

3 Similar situation is also mentioned as an irony in Samuel Butler’s dystopian work, Erewhon (1872).

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people, the crime preventing system and even the whole society still regard them as a part of

the whole accomplices. From this perspective, the statement made by a councilor in Taipei to

expel the homeless in Wanhua (formerly called Monga) by spraying water on them in cold

winter days becomes ridiculous and problematic. It is even more ironic that the councilor

herself is a former jail mentor and well known for her benevolence. Despite this problematic

connection and the public negative emotions towards the homeless, Tsai Ming-liang’s Stray

Dogs seems to have no intention to impress the audience with such image that the homeless

are equal to heinous criminals. The simplified plot reveals the purely persecuted reality of the

protagonist, Lee Kang-sheng’s life, without overinterpretation or misinterpretation of his filthy

look and his miseries. This implicitly shows Tsai’s intention to destigmatize the homeless

through artistic means. Lee Kang-sheng as the homeless father in the film does not participate

in any gangster. He does not even communicate with other homeless fellows. In the film, what

the homeless people do is only work for a living by holding the real-estate advertisement

signboard. The sign holder standing next to Lee is a sign holder himself in real life (Tsai 225).

Tsai also acknowledges that the chubby man with gold-rimmed glasses beside Lee does not

look like a sign holder, but actually he works as the sign holder for part-time job and is well-

experienced (225). By eliminating the boundary between the film and the real life, Tsai subtilty

wipes out the sensory stimuli that the commercial movies often bring to us. Watching Tsai’s

films is no longer a means to escape from the reality. Instead, the movie watching experience

becomes a process of facing the real life. In effect, in Stray Dogs, Tsai adopts the characters’

real names in the film, well-known Lee Kang-sheng and the siblings Lee Yi-cheng and Lee Yi-

chieh respectively. This adoption again shows Tsai’s intention to wipe out the difference

between real life and the filmic life. In the following I will discuss the effects of eliminating

the difference between the real life and the filmic life in the view of capitalism and

homelessness in modern life.

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I. Capitalism and Homeless Life

Tsai’s films feature in slowness, which serves as the resistance to the drastic change of

the capitalistic world. Lim Song-hwee composed the monograph Tsai Ming-liang and a

Cinema of Slowness on the issue of slowness in Tsai’s films, published before Tsai’s Stray

Dogs was released. Even though the Chinese translation of this book was published after Stray

Dogs came out, in the afterword Lim still states that he prefers to leave the theory of slowness

in his monograph without analysis about Stray Dogs. Despite this decision, the slowness he

analyzes can still be applied to and compared with Stray Dogs. As always, Tsai’s films are full

of slow motions. In Stray Dogs, the slow motions are in line with the slow/futile life of the

homeless father. The slowness originally for Tsai is to withstand the trend of the commercial

movies, which change the scenes rapidly within seconds. The commercial films exactly present

the feature of the capitalistic world. Lim also contends:

slowness, for Europe, is at once temporal and material luxury that it can aspire to and

attain. On the other hand, a turn to slowness in rapidly developing regions such as

East Asia may arise from an anxiety toward wholesale modernization and

industrialization and thus a desire to hold on to a less hectic pace associated with an

agricultural past. (41)

With the definition of the luxury of slowness for the modern hustle and bustle capitalistic

society, in fact, Stray Dogs further illustrates the two sides of slowness for the rich and the

poor. On the one hand, as Lim contends, enjoying the slow pace in life is luxurious for people

in cities, since they are under the attack of capitalistic fast-paced lifestyle. On the other hand,

the homeless have no entertainment such as mobile games or cannot afford outdoor activities.

Therefore, the luxury of slowness, or boredom, is actually their daily life. The definition of

luxury was reversed here with the introduction of the homeless life. Slowness is no longer a

luxury, but combined with the inferno-like boredom, which can be unbearable. The capitalistic

citizens have no choice but to be busy, while the homeless have no choice but to be bored.

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In Stray Dogs, the playing of the words marks the satirical discrepancy between the

wealthy and the homeless life. Lee Kang-sheng holds the signboard named “Fareast Glory Real

Estate located in the Ministry District.” Afterwards, he encounters a sign thrown at the roadside,

with the message left in chalk saying “I’m done with my sign. Signed, Wang.” On the sign

shows another real estate named Shenlin-yu (深林裕) in Chinese and “Your Green Home” in

English. Shenlin is the mimic of the word “forest” in Chinese which is pronounced as “senlin”

(森林). Adapted to “Shenlin,” the meaning is doubled as “deep forest” for “shen” means “deep”

in Chinese. The character yu is also doubly played in the film. Originally “senlin-yu” (森林浴)

means “forest bathing” in Chinese. However, here the yu (浴) becomes another character also

pronounced as yu (裕) which means richness. All in all, the sign Shenlin-yu stands for “forest

bathing” and “being rich in the deep forest.” The wordplay of the name becomes an irony for

the homeless Lee Kang-sheng. The places where Lee Kang-sheng and his family wander are

at the margin of the city. For instance, the second scene of the film depicts the two children

wandering at the forest with thick trunks of trees in the background. If not standing on the

safety island holding the sign, Lee Kang-sheng wanders mostly to the swamps with high reeds,

the black-sanded beach, or the construction sites at the margin of the city. Namely, the living

environments of Lee are already the wildlands, the nature, coincidentally the longing for the

capitalistic busy citizens. This part therefore shows the ironic allusion to the ideology of

capitalism.

The reversed relationship between wild nature and civilized society also exists in real life

examples, such as the camping trend in Taiwan. Recently, the camping service goes viral in

Taiwan. The service teams declare that they will provide the customers with full camping tools

and service, including the recreational vehicles and the barbecue materials. Some teams even

roast for the customers. The customers do not need to barbecue themselves. All they need to

do is relax and eat. Ironically, the camping service teams advertise that in this way, the

customers can escape from the busy life and enjoy the Mother Nature in the resorts. However,

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this kind of nature is commercialized. The camping experience loses its original meaning of

adventure and primitive way of life under the manipulative marketing. In comparison, Lee

Kang-sheng’s wandering along the half-natural swamps and riverbanks, and living in the cave-

like abandoned building can be viewed as natural life, the kind that will be looked down upon

by the capitalistic citizens. Here the paradoxical definition of “nature” is revealed. Lee as a

homeless victim of capitalism might not beware of this philosophical discourse. His “natural”

life is definitely not the romantic imagination of the urbanites. The cognitive fissure between

the capitalism consisting of monstrous enterprises entwined with the governmental power and

the victims at the lower orders, including the homeless, might be complemented by actions

taken by some of the artists and intellectuals. By representing the neglected social margins, the

artists raise the issues and bring them forth to the potential witnesses. Additionally, the artists

can also play the role of the intellectuals who criticize the social and political issues through

movements, such as walking into homeless people’s lives, holding activities for them and

becoming one of their partners. Today, the elites no longer play the dominating roles to

“enlighten” the undereducated. Rather, the intellectuals who are conscious of the social issues

tend to cooperate with the grassroots power to lead the life of action to display their discontent

at some social status quos.

Kao Jun-honn, who analyzes the antinomy of nature and unnature in his Multitude: Art

Squats in East Asia, is one of the artists that possess the social consciousness. Kao uses his

artistic strategy as the rebellion against the dominance of capitalism and commercialism.

Through Kao’s introduction, readers learn that the Japanese artist, Misako Ichimura takes the

actions against the neoliberalist position that the Japanese government holds: In 2004, Ichimura

already squatted in Yoyogi Park with other rough sleepers. Against the housing policy which

aimed at expelling the homeless from the park, Ichimura started the Painting Meeting and the

Tea Party for Woman. In the events, to avoid the governments’ restriction of unregistered

commercial activities, and to boost the interactions among the participants, the meeting only

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accepted the exchange of goods. Ichimura focused on women as the opposition to the

patriarchal violence the city Tokyo alludes and the overwhelming number of the male homeless

(30-33). In 2007, the Shibuya District Office aimed to expel the rough sleepers from the

underpass of Japan National Route 246 (Aoyama Dori) with the excuse of cleansing and

beautifying the environment. Under this policy, the residents and the students sent to beautify

the underpass were in conflict with the rough sleepers. One day, the underpass was set on fire

by the unknown, and the rough sleepers were scared and escaped from the spot. Seeing this,

Ichimura bravely went back to the underpass as a rough sleeper, and decorated the burnt black

wall of the underground with stars. Social activists and artists were attracted by Ichimura’s

movements. Ichimura even launched the meetings to discuss the issue of homelessness, and set

a kitchen, inviting residents and the homeless to cook and eat together (37-42).

With Ichimura’s example, Kao brings up the issue of nature. He criticizes the exploiting

capitalistic economy which creates the lower orders of the rough sleepers or the homeless.

Foucault, in his argument, refutes Kantian concept of nature to put the nature at the position

equal to reason or law. Instead, he asserts that not only juridical law but also commercial

relationships constitute the nature. In the commercial logic, Kantian perpetual peace cannot

merely be regarded as the constitutional republicanism, in which the executive belongs to the

government and the legislature belongs to the citizens (Chou 638-43). Instead, “[p]erpetual

peace is guaranteed by nature and this guarantee is manifested in the population of the entire

world and in the commercial relationships stretching across the whole world. The guarantee of

perpetual peace is therefore actually commercial globalization” (Foucault 58). Citing

Foucault’s analysis, Kao questions the paradoxical definition of nature. In the monetary logic

and within a society whose governments are kidnapped by the capital of international

enterprises, the natural rough sleepers become the unnatural, while the anti-natural commercial

activities in boutiques become the natural (Kao 64-66). As Lee Kang-sheng presents in Stray

Dogs, without a settled residence to stay in or a stable source of tap water to keep clean, the

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life style is considered inhuman and thus unnatural. On the contrary, intentionally driving to

the mountains and having a fake camping activity with all the equipment prepared become

“natural” under capitalistic definition. It should also be clarified that the adjective “natural”

does not indicate “good” or “bad;” instead, the issue of commercialized nature creates a

dialectical space for people to reflect upon the humanity and inhumanity that the modernized,

globalized, and materialized world might bring about.

In light of Kao’s and Foucault’s analysis of nature in commercial relationships, I would

connect the concept of nature to the free trade under the discourse of neoliberalism. In fact,

under the banner of capitalism, for the workers, “free” trade is impossible to achieve. In the

manipulation of free trade, workers are exploited by capital holders, striving for being free

from the stranglehold of the highly pressured and rapidly developing society. Jon Solomon

argues that the logistics of international business is parasitic on the national sovereignty. The

Taiwanese government approves, or is forced to approve the international free trade to start

their business in Taiwan with an eye to developing the economy. After the international

enterprises get the power in the field of business, the sovereignty of Taiwan will be hollowed

out by the logistics of free trade. In other words, the government loses the sovereignty and fails

to preserve the completeness and the well-being of a state in the operation of international

business. In this way the labor rights or even democracy will be sacrificed (Solomon 84-86).

Paul Hirst also contends that the multinational companies operate with the state power of the

Triad (Europe, Japan, and North America). In this situation, the labor rights, especially those

“at the bottom of the income distribution scale”, should be protected with social welfare to

maintain the social stability (425). In this sense, the phrase “being rich in the deep forest,” on

the one hand the impossible dream for the homeless, one the other also becomes the curse for

the salaried, who are trapped in the game of capitalism in order to live in the nature. The salaried

earn from hand to mouth, just longing for a trip in the Mother Nature that advertised by

fashionable magazines or TV variety shows. In comparison, Lee Kang-sheng, as a homeless

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father, lives at the half-wild margin of the city. He falls out of the rat race of the capitalistic

society, but reversely gets access to the nature at hand. One scene in which Lee Kang-sheng

carries the sign of Shenlin Yu or “Your Green Home” may strengthen the image of Lee’s weird

freedom. Lee traipses through the construction site without any barrier and goes into the sample

house which might symbolize “Your Green Home.” He lies in the white bed and sleeps tight.

No one wakes him up or routs him out. From the design of these scenes, instead of merely

speaking for the homeless, the film intends to reveal the essence of life, or life per se. In

addition, the other elements in the film, such as a number of motorcycles on the roads and the

construction sites in the background, to some degree represent the absurd reality of capitalism:

The hustle and bustle citizens crave tranquility in the nature, so they have to immerse

themselves in the highly competitive society in order to earn enough to enjoy the

commercialized nature. On the contrary, the sordid homeless, probably despicable to the city

folks, already get the tranquility by having nothing to do.

As Tsai mentioned in the talk of Hong Kong Book Fair in 2014, his movies are the

representation of life. In addition to speaking for the homeless, the life per se is the core

argument for Tsai. He talked about one quotation from the Diamond Sutra or Jingang Jing in

Chinese, “huan zhi ben chu” (還至本處) or “going back to the original place.” The phrase

means that “the buddha, or the monk, goes out to beg for alms every day, and then comes back

to the house to lead a tranquil life.” For people in the highly-pressured and competitive games

of capitalistic accumulation, reflecting on the meaning of life becomes an essential lesson. Tsai

admitted that his movies were not market-oriented and he did not consider the market important

inasmuch as he survived and the sponsors from France kept supporting him. From Tsai’s

perspective, I argue that the time flow of Lee Kang-sheng’s homeless life and this movie forces

the audience to tolerate each second in life that might be neglected before, which splits a time

span for pondering. In such fissure created by the intolerable slowness, three folds of rebellions

are revealed. First, the slowness of Stray Dogs represents the rebellions against the production

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and consumption of commercial movies. Second, the slow movie challenges the audience’s

fast pace in the rat-race-like capitalistic society. Third, also the most critical, Lee’s simple yet

miserable life can be regarded as the rebellion against the capitalistic and consumerist modern

society, disguised under the false imagination that the world is peaceful and prosperous. All in

all, the slowness and the homelessness reveal the paradoxical entity of the capitalistic society.

II. Political Allusions

The economic structure of Taiwan as a capitalistic society is also related to the political

history and development on this island. Two of the scenes in sequence in Stray Dogs allude to

political issues. In the film, Lu Yi-ching is a mother who feeds the stray dogs in a ruined

building (of the Taiwan Motor Transport Company). She calls one of the dogs “Lee Teng-hui,”

the name of the former president of Taiwan. Then the scene is switched to another, in which

Lee Yi-cheng wants to “pee” (described by the subtitle), and also walks through the ruined

building (of an old sugar refinery) with a portrait of Chiang Kai-shek on the wall and that of

Lee Teng-hui on the ground. Calling the dog by the name of former president is a humorous

irony for Taiwanese people to make fun of the politics. On top of the intended sarcasm, it is

necessary to excavate the context of capitalistic economic development entwined with the

politics in Taiwan.

Hill Gates analyzes that Taiwan has already been the capitalistic society since the

seventeenth century. Most of the immigrants were from South China. Their communities were

mostly based on the kinship or “on fictive kinship that assumed a common ancestor for

everyone sharing one of the few Chinese surnames” (34). The Taiwanese peasants export “rice,

sugar, and other valuable crops for export to Fujian’s coastal cities” (35). The valuable timber,

textile fibers, and herbal medicines were also exported from Taiwan. In the nineteenth century,

distilled camphor was exported to Japan; green and oolong teas to the USA. During the Qing

Dynasty, the state agents were sometimes too weak to execute the tax levy (36).

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During the Japanese reign, the capitalistic economy was further controlled by the new

political system brought by the Japanese colonizers. The political power, the law, the police

and modern military forces were introduced to Taiwan, and the homeless also became under

the control of state power as Shen De-wen analyzes. The politics and economy were complicit

with each other under the policy of westernization made by the colonial governance. The

colonial rule laid the foundation of modern juridical system, governance, and police system,

which penetrated into Taiwanese’s daily lives. Even though in the late period of the Japanese

rule, the trend of socialism and communism started to influence Asia, and the colonial

government tends to compromise when confronting the nationalism and social movements in

Taiwan, the ideological trends of liberalism and equality were restricted after the Kuomintang

government evacuated to Taiwan in the 1940s. According to Gates, “more than three hundred

thousand Japanese civilians” were sent back to Japan (44). Some of whom were born in Taiwan

and “had no real home to return to,” and thus became another new homeless class in Japan

(Gates 44). After the Kuomintang government came, they seized the public and private

property left by the Japanese colonizers, and “hunted down the [Taiwanese] survivors of this

bloodbath [228] during the following months, sending many more to torture and jail” (Gates

45). The Taiwanese “liberal-minded, educated, and generally pro-Japanese new middle class

was virtually destroyed” after Kuomintang took over the Taiwan Island (Gates 45-46). The

government of Kuomintang from China started another era of coercion. The martial law was

enforced in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987. The flame of liberal atmosphere at the late period of

Japanese rule was put out.

As the communist counterpart, Kuomintang adopted capitalism of export-oriented

economy in Taiwan. During the period of martial law, the export-oriented capitalistic system

was indeed a success and Taiwan was even included in the categorization called Four Asian

Tigers. Nonetheless, the problem of the homeless had not been solved with the economic

development. As the stories shown in Life Stories of the Homeless in Taiwan, numerous

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middle-aged homeless people were produced alone with urbanization during the golden era of

the economic miracle in Taiwan. When global economic boom faded, the public began to take

note of the sordid bottom life in the society. As in Stray Dogs, the old pictures of Lee Ten-hui

and Chiang Kai-shek imply the fall of past prosperity. On the contrary, the living situation of

Lee Kang-sheng becomes the irony of the honored period. Of the two former presidents, Lee

Teng-hui deserves to be noticed. Lee Teng-hui is the first directly-elected president, on behalf

of Kuomintang. He left Kuomintang in 2001, and founded the Taiwan Solidarity Union,

politically in line with the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Lee can be seen as a turning

point of Taiwan from Chinese Kuomintang to Taiwanese local political parties after the

termination of the martial law. Despite the political oscillation from Kuomintang to DPP or

vice versa, the economic status quo remains depressed for people at the lower social class. The

alternation of the ruling parties did not change the fact of poverty in Taiwan. The ruins shown

in Stray Dogs reveal the violent aspect of capitalism that was concealed by the illusive bubble

of prosperity in the past.4 The failure to cope with the homeless questions indicates that the

old fashion of boosting the economy, for example, Keynesian economics, have lost its effects.

To speak more exactly, the economic policy might never serve for the lower orders, but it is

the money game playing among the wealthy class.

III. The Ontology of Life

Stray Dogs seeks to examine the essence of life, as Tsai mentions. The same-as-real-life

length of time, defined as slowness, could be the evidence. Tsai argues that his films represent

life, and the time in his films equals to the time of real life. Therefore, in Stray Dogs, Lee Kang-

sheng eats half of a lunch box for three minutes and forty-eight seconds, and Chen Shiang-chyi

4 The outcome of ruins brought by capitalism coincides with the situation of Detroit in the US described by Grace Lee Boggs.

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as well as Lee Kang-sheng watches the charcoal drawing on the wall5 for thirteen minutes and

twenty-five seconds. Different from the commercial movies, in real life we can also eat a lunch

box for minutes. We may stare at an artwork that attracts us for a while. In Tsai’s films, the

movie watching experience is not an escape from the tedious daily routine. Instead, he forces

the spectators to experience the reality of life by staring at the scenes of everyday life in the

actual time flow.

Tsai introduced that the origin of movie is literally “motion pictures.” The objects move

in the fixed frame, as The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station shows. By going back to the

origin of movie, Tsai intends to rebel against the commercial movies, which switch the scenes

rapidly and are connected to the cultural production of capitalism. Stray Dogs’s content of

homelessness also combines with its form as a slow film. Similar to the audience who have to

stare at the nearly motionless takes, Lee Kang-sheng has to hold the sign, staring blankly. In

comparison, the motorcyclists in the scenes briefly stop at the red light, glance at him, and

drive away. At other moments, he either lives with his children or wanders in the wilderness.

His life, as the slow movie itself, is slow, for he has no economic surplus to fill in his futile life

as an unemployed homeless man. Lim suggests that the slowness represents “the politics of

aesthetics” rather than pure aesthetics of “luxury in a capitalist modernist milieu” (31-32). The

“excessive temporality” demonstrated by the slowness also “raise[s] questions about the

politics of time, the value of speed, and the material forms in which different temporalities

manifest their ideological investments” (32). That is, the slow films raise the question of

cultural investment in the commercial movies. The commercial movies bring speed and

excitement to the spectators. However, the highly competitive capitalistic society is already a

rapid society, in which the time is pressured and citizens are forced to speed up to catch up

with the rapidness. In this way, the citizens are trapped in the rat race, having no way out from

5 Coincidentally, the charcoal drawing was drawn by Kao Jun-honn, and afterwards was discovered by Tsai.

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the game of speed. On the other hand, the slow films present to the audience what life should

originally be. The question of slowness is sublimated from the pure discussion of aesthetics to

the problematic operation of the capitalism and commercialism in the movie industry or even

the broader issue of exploitation and humanity.

In the context of Stray Dogs, Lee’s boring life resonates with the deadtime. Lim defines

the deadtime as nothing, if little, moving during a period of a scene in slow films. However, it

is the deadtime that reveals the emptiness of life when the audience are forced to endure the

slowness of the movie. Possibly the film aims to criticize the hustle and bustle and material

surplus in the city that cover up the bare feelings without too many sensory stimuli. As Tsai

states in the behind-the-scenes story, the supermarkets and hypermarkets always give off the

impression of oppressive material surplus (230). The material surplus is instead replaced by

the excess of time in the slow films and the lives of the homeless. The audience are also forced

to endure the boredom of the film, the real life, in the process of watching the film. Probably

this is also one of the meanings of huan zhi ben chu that Tsai intends to convey. The homeless

taste the emptiness in life, and the audience are exposed in the atmosphere of boredom while

watching the movie, too.

In addition to the images, the sound in the film also implies the contrast between material

excessiveness and scarcity. The noise of the background sound in Stray Dogs can also be seen

as the oppressive feeling of material surplus and temporal shortage in capitalistic society. Lim

sorts out the sounds of crying, peeing, and sexual activities as the “uncomfortable sounds” in

Tsai’s movies (133-40). In Stray Dogs, the uncomfortable sounds derive not from bodily fluids

and movements but from the noise of motorcycles and construction sites. It is the noise

produced by non-human objects that makes the experience of watching slow movies

uncomfortable and intolerable. In Stray Dogs, Tsai combines the form of time in slow movies,

the experience of watching slow films, and the content of slow life as the homeless. He claims

this movie will be his last feature film, and the combination might also be viewed as the

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refinement and annotation to his achievement in movie industry. With the three elements in his

film, the slowness becomes the true life. The fast-paced capitalistic life is thus exorcized under

Tsai’s operation of slowness. For instance, when Lee Kang-sheng stands on the safety island

holding the sign showing the advertisement of real estates, the motorcycles and automobiles

roar through. When Lee pees and smokes beside the bogs in the construction sites, the noise of

constructing pierces in. The uncomfortable sounds produced by human bodies are overlapped

by even more uncomfortable sounds as the symbols of capitalist prosperity in Stray Dogs.

Perhaps Tsai intentionally disposes the noise of capitalistic speeding society in the background

in order to compare the simple life of the homeless. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi claims

that “[tao] is in that excrement” to indicate that tao exists everywhere (Zhuangzi). I would

suggest that the real tao for Tsai, exists in the homelessness. Although Lee Kang-sheng, as a

homeless person, may die without legal protection or attention from the public, the essence of

life discloses itself in such bare, empty, and boring life. However, I am not claiming that people

should literally lead a homeless life. Instead, the homelessness can be taken as a concept. The

homeless life of Lee Kang-sheng serves as the rebellion against the capitalistic exploitation on

the workers. The simple life is also the core value to construct a small local community, where

people can live peacefully and decently with their neighbors or the ones they love. The bottom-

up value of leading a simple life in a local community may resist the top-down hegemony of

international commercial activities, which exploit the workers, the consumers, and human

beings generally.

IV. Ruins and the Capitalistic Exploitation

To view the bottomed-up grassroots power of homelessness as the niche against the

exploitation of capitalistic ideology, it is essential to examine the ruins after the economic

change in Taiwan in Stray Dogs. The ruins in Stray Dogs represent the outcome of capitalistic

exploitation. The buildings were used and then abandoned once they lost economic value. The

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building of Taiwan Motor Transport Company and the old sugar refinery were produced in the

once prosperous era. With the transformation of industry and economic structure, the buildings

are no longer in need. In this film, the squatting of Lee Kang-sheng and his children merely

presents the filthy and hopeless lives of the homeless. However, it is hard to go beyond the

desperation of the homeless lives if the discourse stops here. Therefore, I would like to suggest

the ruins as territory for the possibility of rebirth—through the aid of artists and intellectuals,

squatting in the ruins can be regarded as a recycle system, reusing the deserted buildings. On

this train of thought, the philosophy of ruins evoked during the Second World War may serve

as the comparison with the ruins created by modern capitalism. In the discourse of ruin

philosophy, Max Pensky rejects Maurice Halbwachs’s viewpoint on “stone buildings” and

nature as both steady and “unchanged,” for “Halbwachs himself did not experience the mass

destruction of many of the cities of Europe during the Second World War […] and died shortly

before the war’s end” (66-67). In spite of this, Pensky agrees with Halbwachs that the buildings

are loaded with the urban collective memory. In comparison, Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of

natural history seems more dynamic, arguing that the development of humanity is like the

nature, appearing “under the sign of the historical repetition of catastrophe, and therefore as

mythically recursive and static” (Pensky 66). After defining natural history and the dialectical

relationship between humanity and nature, Pensky analyzes the philosophy of Heidegger,

Benjamin, and Sebald on ruins. Seeing the Americanized West Germany, Heidegger claims

that the rapid reconstruction during the postwar period “has generated housing but not dwelling”

(Pensky 72). Heideggerian dwelling implies to dwell pastorally in houses built with wood,

Pensky explains (73). Living in the wooden etui, which becomes Totenbaum, the coffin, and

leaving no ruin except “the midden cairns of empty shells of whelks, mussels and clams” is

probably the ideal way of dwelling for Heidegger (Pensky 76). On the other hand, Sebald’s

viewpoints on Kartenspiel, the “card game called Cities Quartet,” on which the images of the

main buildings in the German cities were printed, express another perspective on ruins (Pensky

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82). One of the buildings on the card is the fort Breendonk, which later became Nazi’s

concentration camp. In Austerlitz, pondering on the fort Breendonk, Sebald conveys his

gloomy observation on ruination as “the process in which nature takes its slow revenge against

humans’ will to impose lasting significance on their landscape” (Pensky 84, 86). The fort was

once for military purpose, and then became Nazi’s prison, but it could still not escape the

natural withering and became a ruin.

Among the three philosophers, Benjamin’s Parisian arcades can be viewed as the middle

way. Different from Naples’ “unplanned and uncontrollable” porosity with the labyrinth-like

lanes, or Moscow’s “anti-labyrinth” “political taiga,” the arcades in Paris present a kind of

balance between “history and nature” (Pensky 78-80). Paris is the combination of the

staggering “regional and national wealth,” which appears simultaneously “fragile and

indestructible” (Pensky 79). The arcades are like the primitive caves; under the cave-like

arcades are small shops. The arcades grow out of outdated national planning on Paris,

representing the natural development of civilian economy in the city. For Benjamin, Paris

might be the model of city development without equal. By the same token, the homeless Lees

occupying the ruins also represents the atavistic demeanors to live in the caves and brings

vitality to the deserted space. The homeless have no choice but to occupy the places, but this

is also the reactive force that occurs due to malfunctional capitalistic operation.

In comparison with the ruin philosophy developed during the two World Wars, the ruins

created under the trade wars nowadays are another type of inhumanity. The trade wars

transform the form from concrete bombs to abstract money flows, but their essence of

thanatopolitics remains. In addition to the trade wars launched by the US, I believe that the

capitalism in the form of free trade is essentially a general war against humanity. Kao also

questions the capitalism which keeps creating ruins in Taiwan. The mural in the ruined building

of the Taiwan Motor Transport Company was drawn by Kao, based on John Thomson’s photo,

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Lalung6, Formosa (1871). As shown on the poster of Stray Dogs, the cobblestones at the bank

of Laonong River in the picture subtly connect with the debris on the floor of the building. The

natural view of Laonong River and the history of once flourishing bus company thus co-exist

in a space, but give off a weird and ambivalent atmosphere. What presents in the mural is the

river and the luxuriant forest in the mountain, while the mural exists in a ruined and deserted

building. The paradox between the mural of Lalung River and men-made dystopia of the ruins

thus presents before the viewers outside the film and the viewers in the film, namely, Lee Kang-

sheng, Lu Yi-ching, and Chen Shiang-chyi, sharply criticizing the impact of capital flow on

the buildings and human beings. The Lees are forced to undergo the simple and “natural” lives

without electricity and modern entertainments. On the contrary, the natural scenery in the mural

is what the urbanites pursues.

Coincidentally, the creator of the mural, Kao, also criticizes the operation of capitalism

by taking artistic actions and investigating the social performance arts and movements in Asia.

In Multitude: Art Squats in East Asia, Kao introduces the Oasis Project launched by the couple

Kim Kang and Kim Youn Hoan in South Korea. This Squatting movement works as the

resistance to the capitalistic Korean society, where the right to habitation is deprived by the

corrupted government and chaebols (Kao 123). In Hong Kong, Wooferten (meaning: the hall

of urban regeneration) uses artistic skills to “suburbanize” Hong Kong, one of the densest cities

in the world (Kao 171). By interacting with the community, Kao contends that the Wooferten

reached three-fold antinomy: first, the art—the antinomy between the gentry and the folk,

second, the capital—the antinomy between the rich and the poor, and third, the politics—the

antinomy between the democracy and the totalitarianism (179). Wooferten can be looked upon

as a place where the social differentiations meet and an iconic battlefield between the freedom

in Hong Kong and the totalitarianism from Beijing. To certain degree, the Oasis Project, the

6 Presumably “Laonong” (荖濃) in transliteration of modern Mandarin.

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Wooferten, and Benjamin’s Parisian arcades share something similar—they react against the

top-down capitalism with grassroots movements. They seek the natural civilian development

to keep the regions prosperous, instead of national or international power forcing on the folks.

Squatting the ruins, the homeless also lead primitive lives in the cave-like space, albeit

outrageously and unwillingly, in the highly developing society. As the industrial and economic

development constantly produces wastes and ruins by consuming resources on the Earth, the

homeless are reusing the deserted, such as filthy clothes or ruined buildings, like what the

primitive men will do. The only difference is the entity of “nature.” The primitive men get

resources from Mother Nature, while the homeless interact with the commercialized nature. In

fact, George Orwell also briefly mentions the categorization of the tramps as the atavism “in a

book of criminology” (211). While Orwell considers the emergence of the homeless is from

the failure of the law, in Stray Dogs it tends to be the capitalistic exploitation that causes tramps’

atavistic demeanors, living in cave-like ruins without tap water to always keep hygienic and

electricity to maintain decent lives. This kind of atavism is unwanted. The scene in which the

Lees change clothes together shows the violence of the shot, intruding in their naked lives. It

is especially noticeable that the girl, Lee Yi-chieh even shows her immature, hairless mons

pubis in front of the camera. The girl resembles the homeless, who are defenseless in the half-

public and half-wild ruins when faced with the violent intrusion of governments allied with

monstrous enterprises. The capitalistic system deprives the homeless of their decency,

intending to discard their lives from civil society. In capitalistic logics it is natural and normal

that their lives remain filthy, futile, and meaningless. However, I deem this as a gap for

knowledgeable intervention. This is also the purpose of this thesis, which aims at finding a

possible solution to mend the awkward and absurd reality of the homeless lives. With the

instances of the artistic movements led by Kao, Ichimura, Mr. and Mrs. Kim, to name a few,

the atavistic tramps return as the scavengers who reuse and rearrange the chaos that is left by

the wasteful modern life style, and this would possibly be one of the origins of grassroots power.

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V. Repetition of the Plot

Finally, in this part of my thesis, I want to discuss the overlap of the film’s onset and

ending. In the first scene of the film, the mother played by Yang Kuei-mei combs her hair and

gloomily stares at the sleeping children. The scene implies the beginning of the family’s

disintegration. Nevertheless, at the end of the film, after the mother played by Lu Yi-ching

rescues the children, the scene switches back to the time before the family falls apart. In the

house with burnt black walls, the family members happily celebrate Lee Kang-sheng’s birthday.

The burnt walls in the last scene imply the fall of the family, which could be connected to the

first scene where the wall is the same burnt black. Considering the composition “A Day Out”

Lee Yi-cheng writes in the last scene, the overlap of the plot suggests the homeless life is a

swirl and there is no way out. From the perspective of language, the English translation “A

Day Out” is Jiaoyou (郊遊) in Chinese, the same as the Chinese title of Stray Dogs. The two

English translations of Jiaoyou play a double game here. On one hand, Jiaoyou means “a day

out” for the busy citizens who seek for the relaxation from the hustle and bustle of daily life.

On the other hand, the Lees already live in the half-wild margin of the city, indicating the

situation of no way out. The difference between the norm, namely, the settled and employed

citizens, and the homeless is here blurred. The salaried are trapped in the highly competitive

lifestyle, and the homeless are deserted by the society. Both sides are exploited by the logistics

of unfree free trade and the thanatopolitics of capitalistic operation.

Nonetheless, if we view this repetition as the natural recycling process of life and death,

the repetition of the plot might be an ecosystem in another way. One scene when Lee Kang-

sheng is singing Yue Fei’s Man Jiang Hong in Stray Dogs might be taken as the evidence of

this surmise. Man Jiang Hong appears in the textbook of junior high school in Taiwan. It talks

about Yue fei’s want to take revenge for the Song Dynasty on the Jin Dynasty, founded by the

Jurchen people. The poem, or ci (詞), can be explained as Lee’s attitude to revenge for his life

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and get out of the situation as a homeless man. In addition, Lee cries when singing this song.

This reaction explicitly reveals Lee’s disinclination to accept his status quo. What he lacks is

the means to return his miserable life to the felicitous one before, when he is still able to enjoy

the massage chair as shown in the last scene. If we only focus on the plot itself in this film, the

film will be left as it is and there is no way out. However, if the creation of this film is taken

into account, explanatory route will be different. Tsai’s action of shooting this film and

exposing it to the public’s eyes can be regarded as an intervention. Kao’s mural in the film

linking to his and other artists’ experiments in East Asia is the second intervention, and the

theorization of this thesis the third. It is the artistic and intellectual intervention that converts

the homeless issue into the energy against the devastating capitalistic power relation. In such

revelation, Lee’s life becomes the stepping-stone to doubt the endless production and

consumption of capitalistic ideology, and the interventions further counterbalance the

destructive power. Therefore, the repetition of the plot is broken up by the formation of this

film. In this sense, the repetition becomes tentative and contingent. The exposure of Lee’s

homeless life fertilizes the critiques on the homeless issue, the other homeless people, and Lee

himself. Lee’s dead end in life reversely nurture the soil for reflection on the cultural production

of capitalism. The whole operation is similar to the ecosystem, where the lives also come and

go repeatedly. The death does not mean no way out, but it will turn into fertilizers for other

lives, and the whole system is circulating.

From this viewpoint, Heidegger’s and Benjamin’s theories can also serve as the

complement to the discourse of destruction and rejuvenation. Both of them were seeking the

ideal of repetition in life and death or repetition in depression and prosperity, instead of leading

things into the blind alley. Witnessing the postwar ruins, Heidegger turned to a philosophical

ideal that produces not “housing” but “dwelling,” which leaves no ruin in the world by leading

a pastoral ecofriendly life (Pensky 72). Life and death meet at Heideggerian farmhouse and

Totenbaum, the coffin. The wooden houses where people dwell also rot away with the dwellers

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who pass away. Both of living and dwelling are temporary in such ecological cycle. From this

viewpoint, the homeless nomadic lifestyle, incorporating with the artistic social movements, is

in fact a life of pastoralism in the sense of Heideggerian ideal. As the Lees in Stray Dogs who

are sheltered in the ruins bring life back to the deserted building, the act of squatting in the

deserted buildings reuses and revives the waste left by the capitalistic exploitation, making the

dead space vigorous again. Even though the ruins are still private properties, the rebellion

against the law to squat in the ruins reversely makes the deserted buildings dwellable. What’s

more, in the process of creating the ruins and reusing the ruins, the ecological system might

evolve. Benjamin in his Arcades Project provides a more positive meaning to the ruin theory.

For Benjamin, Paris is a city “between nature and history: seismic, volcanic, uncontrollable,

deeply angry, beyond argument,” and the arcades are like the lava which constantly changes

or even destroys Paris, but meanwhile the volcanic ash will fertilize the city and make it flourish

again (Pensky 80). Furthermore, Benjamin also analogizes the arcades in Paris to the primitive

caves. The arcades are not included in Paris’ urban planning, but the commercial activities

boosted the cave-like arcades. Therefore, the emergence of the arcades is in reality against the

national urban design of Paris, but reversely provides shelters for the walkers and revitalizes

the once deserted areas. By the same token, the homeless way of life, with artistic and

intellectual intervention, reversely activates the deserted ruins created by the fast-developing

society, and it is the intervention that converts the homeless issue into the energy against the

devastating capitalistic power relation. It therefore seems ironic that the commerce and

capitalism, believed to be the power of prosper, creates numerous ruins, whereas the homeless

incorporating with the artistic acts, seeming to be futile and unproductive, make the ruins

dwellable again by squatting in them.

Recalling the anti-commercialist attitude of this slow movie, we find that the release of

Stray Dogs aims to break the oppression of modern consumerism and capitalism. Tsai’s charity

acts to raise money for the homeless, hand in hand with Zenan Homeless Social Welfare

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Foundation (Renan shehui fuli cishan shiye jijinhui 人安社會福利慈善事業基金會), also

explains his intention to speak for the homeless. If there is no artistic and intellectual

intervention, the ecosystem composed of the homeless, the ruins, and the international capital

force is pathological. This is why I shift the point from the repetition of the plot to the ecological

cycle consisting of the destructive power of the capitalism and the reactive force of artistic

social movements. Under such premise, I would like to suggest the grassroots power and

community building as the possible implementation of Orwellian small garden and kitchen in

the workhouse and Kao’s introduction of the artistic movements and experiments in East Asia.

The sociological theories and real examples will be introduced in the next chapter.

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Chapter Four: Sociological Theories of Community-building Schemes

From the inspiration of George Orwell’s “small farm” and “kitchen garden,” and Stray

Dogs linking to the artistic acts and movements, the silhouette of community-building concept

faintly emerges (Orwell 215). In Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell puts forward the

issue of small farm and kitchen garden inasmuch as he hopes to make the tramps useful and

productive by providing them “a sound day’s work” which can feed them decently (215). This

can be seen as the prototype of the community-building project I am going to discuss in this

chapter. On the other hand, the artistic movements introduced by Kao are also an embodiment

of community-building project, and Tsai cinematizes the homeless issue to make it visible to

the public. Both of Orwell and Tsai sincerely care for the underprivileged; otherwise, their

works will not be presented as they are. In other words, they hold the value of humanity and

criticize the institutions which dehumanize the destitute. To reify the conception of humanity,

I would like to borrow James and Grace Lee Boggs definition that humanity is the ability to

reflect upon the past, think about the present and “project into the future” (14). With such

premise, in this chapter, I will firstly investigate James and Grace Lee Boggs’ ideas of

revolutions from their historical introductions to the French Revolution, the October

Revolution in Russia, and the Chinese Communist Revolution in the twentieth century. With

the analysis of historical revolutions and her experience of movements in Detroit, Grace Lee

Boggs develops the philosophy of revolution further in the twenty-first century, and highlights

the idea of grassroots power. Although the revolutions in the twentieth century and the

grassroots power in the twenty-first century all put emphasis on the power of the proletariats,

it should be noticed that the leading role was shifted from the state-scaled plans to local

communities consisting of members as individuals.

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Second, the theories about socialism and its new proposals in the twenty-first century will

be discussed. Instead of adopting the dichotomy of capitalism and socialism, Erik Olin Wright

categorized the economic structure into capitalism, statism, and socialism, none of which can

independently form a society. Therefore, he then brought out the concept of hybrid, in which

the social empowerment penetrates into state power and economic power. The examples of

social empowerment mentioned by Wright provide more theoretical foundation for Kao Jun-

Honn’s Multitude aforementioned, in which the topic surrounds the local movements in

connection with the homeless people. I will take the sociological hypothesis as the hinge to

link the issue of homelessness to the community-building projects, and to seek the possible

solutions to the long-lasting yet suspended social problem.

In England, the question of homelessness might have originated from the Black Death in

the fifteenth century, with the dissolution of the monasteries as social support. In the nineteenth

century, the desolate living condition in the workhouses was created under the exercise of the

New Poor Law. With industrial development and social change, the question of homelessness

nowadays can be ascribed to the malfunction of the capitalistic society, in which the surplus of

production fails to be distributed to some homeless people. Despite the failure of communist

nations in the twentieth century, it would be risky to fall into the black-or-white fallacy by

taking capitalism as the only solution to social economy. On account of the economic

inequality, exploitation, poverty, and so on, the role of capitalism in our daily life should be

revisited, reconsidered, and reappraised.

I. The Detroit Experience

The questions brought about by capitalistic failures were not new for Detroiters since the

1960s. Faced with the Black Power Movement, the counterculture movement, and the women’s

liberation movement, James and Grace Lee Boggs started to ponder on the meaning of

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revolutions. It is common to relate revolutions to the overturn of a regime. However, James

and Grace Lee Boggs clarify that “a revolution is not the same as a rebellion or an insurrection

or a revolt or a coup d’état” (16). Instead, a revolution is a group of people that not only fights

to change the current condition but is also ready to take up the responsibility to organize and

operate a potential community with humanitarian ideals. Furthermore, revolutions for James

and Grace Lee Boggs carry with the meaning of existentialism. Namely, people are no longer

dominated by determinism, but have the rights to choose whether revolutions are necessary or

not. In the 1960s, James and Grace Lee Boggs still thought upon the idea of revolution on the

national scale. The French Revolution is pinpointed as the milestone of the concept of

revolution:

The French Revolution opened the minds of the Western world to the possibilities within

existing reality for sudden and rapid developments toward an ideal. It thus weakened the

concept of reality as static and unchanging, and began to replace it with a concept of reality

as evolving and dynamic. (125)

Since the French Revolution in 1789, the history has stopped its sluggish pace under the

authoritarian reign of the aristocrats, and revolutions serve as one of the alternatives when

people are not satisfied with their rulers. Two-hundred years later, the Russian Revolution

became the first historical communist revolution in the world, followed by the Chinese Cultural

Revolution. For reviewers standing at the twenty-first century, the silhouette of history and

development about communism is especially clear. This becomes the soil for us to reconsider

the meaning and operation of social power.

II. The Russian Revolution

Russia had its history and culture of serfdom, in which the social class was fixed and

inherited, and the peasants were prohibited from freely migrating among obshchiny, or

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agricultural communes (Su 150, International Encyclopedia of Ukraine). Under the protection

of obshchiny, the peasants shunned competition and social differentiation, seeing Tsar as their

father (Su 150, Wang Jin-wen 22). Nonetheless, the system prohibiting competition implied

the lack of progress. The failures of the country and the call for change ensued. The Crimean

War, the commercialization in the late seventeenth century, or the “enlightened despotism”

introduced by Alexander II’s tutor, Vasily Zhukovskii, all contributed to Emancipation

Manifesto (1861) and Stolypin land reform (1906-17) (Su 150, Pereira 101, 103, Wang Jin-

wen 24).

The emancipation of the peasants failed to occlude the eruption of revolution. The

peasants originally thanked Tsar for liberating them from the serfdom, only to find the

landlords became the rich and the majority of others became the propertyless lower orders in

the tide of westernization and marketization/capitalization (Wang Jin-wen 24). The flame of

revolution thus burnt from Alexander II and the aristocratic intelligentsia (such as Zhukovskii)

to “vulgar intelligentsia,” or raznochintsy. For Wang Jin-wen, the vulgar intelligentsia had

three characteristics: compassion for the proletariats, social consciousness, and the

humanitarian mind (22). The humanitarian mind, which the aristocratic intelligentsia lacked,

connected the class of intelligentsia with the class of peasants and workers (Wang Jin-wen 22).

This historical background provided fertilizers for Lenin and the following Russian

Revolution. In the course of emancipation and westernization, Lenin represented the “class of

educated Russians” rising from peasants (James and Grace Lee Boggs 27). The Imperial Russia

lacked “elected Congress” and “freedom of speech,” “and anyone who spoke out about political

matters risked arrest and exile” (James and Grace Lee Boggs 27). Dissatisfaction toward Tsar

amounted to the revolution in 1905, and in the 1917 Russian Revolution, Tsar was overturned.

James and Grace Lee Boggs regarded this historical change as a turning point for Lenin to take

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up the responsibility to form a new country; however, they ignored the process of power

struggle in the regime.

In effect, at the end of the nineteenth century, the Marxist Social-Democracy, as opposed

to Narodniks (populists), embraced the ideology of liberalism, in which Lenin joined the ranks.

On the contrary, the populists hoped to retain the system of agrarian communes (Bian 37-38).

Nevertheless, in 1906, Lenin proposed the idea of nationalization of the land, for he saw the

evil of Stolypin reform (Bian 42). Even though the land reform propelled industrial progress

in Russia, in reality, only 20 percent of the farmers had their own land (BBC, Encyclopædia

Britannica). After the 1917 Russian Revolution, Lenin even abolished Stolypin land laws (Bian

43). During 1917-18, Lenin and the Bolsheviks launched political struggles to defeat the

opponents (the Social-Democrats); his populist tendency thus developed into super populism

(Bian 44-46). In the end, Lenin’s revolutionary movements adopted neither the Prussian Path

(national capitalism) nor the American Path (democratic capitalism). Instead, the commune

system in the Soviet evolved into a system even more centralized than the old empire, which

is still influencing the development of modern Russia (Bian 46).

From the historical dialectics, Lenin indeed took up the responsibility to reorganize Russia,

but meanwhile, he put all the communes under state control, which was suspicious of despotism

and totalitarianism. James and Grace Lee Boggs seemed to praise Lenin and depreciate Stalin

by citing Lenin’s description on Stalin, “too rude and inconsiderate of comrades” (43). They

even criticized Stalin’s blind pursuit of economic and military growth (James and Grace Lee

Boggs 44). Nevertheless, from the perspective of centralization of the Soviet, putting all

properties under state control indeed hindered the flexibility and developments of “continuing”

revolutions from the bottom1.

1 Except for the historical reasons, the failure of Soviet Union can be attributed to many factors, including democratic centralism, bureaucratization of the cadres, and the discrepancy between the administrators and the laborers, etc., which all came from communist experiments, however, proved to be ineffective.

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III. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, or the GPCR

The Soviet was often juxtaposed with Communist China, which received the help from

and was deeply influenced by Communist Russia. Among the communist revolutions in China,

the Cultural Revolution could be seen as the most significant or even epic one, albeit a grand

failure. In addition, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was seen as opponents by

Kuomintang, who came to Taiwan after being defeated in Mainland China. With respect to the

relationship between Kuomintang and CCP, to discuss the failure of communist party in China

might comparatively help in discussing the capitalistic failure faced in Taiwan.

Signifying corrupted Kuomintang as the ally of the US and the followers of capitalistic

ideology, James and Grace Lee Boggs pinned their hopes on Mao Zedong, who “look[ed]

toward Marxist-Leninism for a revolutionary theory” (50, 62-63). Mao emphasized “practice”

more than book knowledge and launched several national movements, such as Let a Hundred

Flowers Bloom, the Great Leap Forward, and the GPCR (James and Grace Lee Boggs 53-55,

73-74, 77). Among the movements, the GPCR was defined by Badiou as “a political episode

of the highest importance,” which propelled China to be a revolutionary state without any

possibility of further revolutions within the regime (116).

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward movement, Mao became the minority in the

party, yet his “historical and popular legitimacy,” which was constructed during the Yan’an

period, still prevailed and kept influencing the operation of the party (Badiou 112). To regain

his authority, he chose to gather a secret committee 2 in 8th August 1966, leading the

composition of the “quite probably illegal” text of the Sixteen Points, “with the support of the

2 This secret group is even analogized to the operation of feudalistic China, in which the emperors often recruited their intimates to counter against the power of the prime ministers (Wang Yi 55-60).

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army (or certain units loyal to Lin Biao)” (Badiou 118-19). In this “state of exception,” Mao

became a being superior to the party and the state.

During the movement of GPCR, with the instruction of the Sixteen Points, the state

apparatus, the party, the army, and the general leader of Mao Zedong were combined together.

The centralized party-state form gradually took shape and further solidified by the mass, among

whom mostly are the youth. Since the main force of the Red Guards was the youth, the GPCR

can be looked upon as the representation of “the anti-intellectual radicalism” (Badiou 130).

The terms of the Sixteen Points, the Incident of Shanghai Commune and the Wuhan Incident,

all showed that the Mao as well as his minority group was the leader second to none (Badiou

131-35, 139-46).

After the Cultural Revolution, the form of party-state thus took its root in the regime of

China, and Mao became the symbol surpassing the party and the state. Taking its atrocious

results into consideration, undoubtedly, we have to avoid this absolute form of totalitarianism

and centralism. However, given Mao’s experience and his legacy of “the last revolution that

was still attached to the motif of classes and of the class struggle,” we therefore have a reference,

though miserable, to reflect upon the idea of communism (Badiou 156). Today, the

communism is to certain extent obsolete, but with the humanitarianism and equalitarianism as

the core value, the development and the future of communism’s legacy is still a possible tool

to defend against the monstrous and gigantic coalition of governments and international

enterprises.

IV. Revolution in the Twenty-first Century

James and Grace Lee Boggs have been promoting the concept of cultural revolution

inherited from the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, since

Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century was published in 1974. Affirming that the

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revolutions cannot be copied and pasted to any country, including the US, James and Grace

Lee Boggs have been pondering on the issue of the American version revolution. The US has

long been confirmed as a country holding the ideology of capitalism opposite to communism.

However, the capitalism of accumulation and production-consumption relationship appears to

come to its end in the twenty-first century when more and more economic and environmental

issues are put forward. Detroit underwent the capitalistic wash from the overproducing

industrial development in the 1930s to “today’s casino economy” in which financial ups and

downs take control of people’s emotion and material life (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 4). While

capitalism lost its charm as the economic miracles during post-war period, communism, from

the eyes in the twenty-first century, is not the alternative, either. Martin Luther King Jr. points

out

“[capitalism] encourages a cutthroat competition and selfish ambition that inspire men to

be more I-centered than thou-centered.” Communism, as it had been instituted by parties

in state power, had reduced men to “a cog in the wheel of the state.” “Each represents a

partial truth,” concluded King. “Communism fails to see the truth in individualism.

Capitalism fails to realize that life is social.” (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 3)

Beyond the traditional thought between capitalism and communism, King Jr. holds the belief

in social democracy as a niche against communism, or totalitarianism in 1950s American social

context.

In the twenty-first century, the choice between capitalism or communism is no longer the

locus of debate, but Grace Lee Boggs further develops the concept of community-building and

democracy by putting her philosophy in practice. As a philosopher, Grace Lee Boggs does not

hold back and hide herself in the “ivory tower” (Introduction). Instead, she believes that

“through daily life and struggle, through collective study and debate among diverse entities,

and through trial and error within multiple contexts” will the good ideas be developed

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(Introduction). Believing in the power of philosophy, Boggs thus puts the philosophy of

community-building into action by bringing forward the old but meaningful and practical

concept, namely, love and responsibility:

Love isn’t just something you feel. It’s something you do every day when you go out and

pick up the papers and bottles scattered the night before on the corner, when you stop and

talk to a neighbor, when you argue passionately for what you believe with whoever will

listen, when you call a friend to see how they’re doing, when you write a letter to the

newspaper, when you give a speech and give ’em hell, when you never stop believing that

we can all be more than we are. In other words, Love isn’t about what we did yesterday;

it’s about what we do today and tomorrow and the day after. (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 3).3

The revolution in the twenty-first century is not a model that a group of people need to follow;

instead, it is a progressive process developed through the dialectical discussion and

experiments among local community members. Love is never a slogan or gratis dictum that

often ends up in nihilism. With Boggs’ detailed definition, the significance of mutual support

and benefit among human beings reveals itself concretely in front of the readers.

In addition to love, as James and Grace Lee Boggs’s assertion in 1974, revolution is

different from rebellion inasmuch as revolutionaries will take up the responsibilities to organize

a community-to-be. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the event of recalling the Wisconsin Governor

Scott Walker, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement, Grace Lee Boggs kept promoting the

concept of “responsibilities” to replace “rights” in this new epoch (Preface to the 2012 Edition,

hereafter Preface 2012, italics in the original). Responsibilities require “more socially-minded

human beings” and “more participatory and place-based concepts of citizenship and democracy”

(Preface 2012). Not only do the group organizers have to be responsible but every citizen has

3 It has to be clarified that the love here is related less to faraway state administrative power, or called the patriotism, than to our “neighborhood.” Here the focus of revolutions has been shifted from the mass movements to daily-life changes.

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to take up the responsibilities to take part in public affairs. From the vantage point of the

twenty-first century, Grace Lee Boggs does crystalize her view on revolutions from the scale

of a state to revolutions in local communities and grassroots power in everyday life. The idea

of top-down static communism has been changed to the social empowerment from the ground

up.4

Breaking away from the communism treating people as cogs, in the new era of revolutions,

the essence of human beings reflects itself on the value of humanity, free will, and “souls.” In

their 1974 publication, James and Grace Lee Boggs only devised the new idea of work that

was helpful to the community, other people, and self (243). In the twenty-first century, Grace

Lee Boggs elaborates on the concept of work further by citing Olga Bonfiglio’s response in the

Reimagining Work Conference:

“Basically, work is about one’s calling in life and contributions to the community while

jobs are more about the specific tasks people perform for an organization,” she remarked.

“‘Jobs’ have a dehumanizing effect as people fill interchangeable slots in a big machine.

In today’s global economy workers can be easily replaced with those willing to work for

lower wages. So, transformation to any new system of ‘work’ must begin with one’s own

personal discernment about identity and purpose in this life.” (Preface 2012)

Briefly speaking, work is relevant to personal development and social contributions, but jobs

merely involve salary and daily expenses. On this topic, Orwell’s arguments can make the

discourse more complete. In Down and Out in Paris and London, he already criticizes the

meaning of “work.” He argues that “there is no essential difference between a beggar’s

livelihood and that of numberless respectable people” (190, italics in the original). For Orwell,

the “trade” of a beggar is the same as other workers, such as a navy and an accountant, “quite

4 Again, the grassroots power is different from the revolutions directing to overturning a regime and funding a new state. The grassroots power is a counterweight to the gigantic capitalistic institutions.

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useless, of course, but, then, many reputable trades are quite useless” (191). He even praises

the beggars to be honest than “most patent medicines,” more high-minded than “a Sunday

newspaper proprietor,” and more amiable than “a hire-purchase tout” (191). In such

comparison, a tramp is “harmless parasite,” who is only a “bare living” in a community (191).

In short, Orwell criticizes the capitalism and consumerism’s conception of work, or “jobs” in

Grace Lee Boggs’s sense—to measure the jobs according to their incomes. Nowadays, Grace

Lee Boggs discusses the difference between work and jobs from the perspective of the post-

industrial period, but overall in the same vein. Grace Lee Boggs and Orwell both want to get

rid of the potential materialism latent in jobs, and unravel the light of humanity in “work.”

Today, the “robots have replaced workers on assembly lines,” but at the same time, they also

replace the “fragmenting and inhuman” jobs we perceived in the industrial age (Grace Lee

Boggs Preface to the Paperback Edition, Ch. 5). Hi-Tech (high technology) on the one hand

might result in the globalization of dehumanized management of human resources by exporting

the factories and production lines, but on the other hand, with the help of robots, human beings

have the opportunity to mitigate the unnecessary labor and exploitation (Grace Lee Boggs Ch.

3). The debate between Hi-Tech and humanity, and the discussion of values between work and

jobs derive from philosophy and dialectical thinking. In consistence with her claim in 1974,

Grace Lee Boggs still believes that philosophy can cultivate people’s souls and help achieve

self-determination. Grace Lee Boggs enforced her philosophical practice and recorded her

revolutionary life in Detroit to confront what Martin Luther King Jr. found hard to dissolve:

“the giant triplets of racism, militarism and materialism”. (Introduction).

The movements against racism, militarism and materialism promote the ideal of

humanitarianism. In American context, “the ‘arsenal of democracy’ to defeat Hitler and Tojo

was now clouded by the recognition that militarism was a profitable enterprise” (Grace Lee

Boggs Introduction). The military forces evilly conspire with the capitalistic elements, bringing

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out the weird logic that going to war is equivalent to making money. In regard to earning a

living, the international enterprises control our everyday life from production to consumption,

and the “ideals of work became factory oriented” (Preface 2012). Precisely speaking, people

work in factories in order to earn money instead of wholeheartedly doing something to benefit

their communities. The act of working is thus alienating people’s bodies from their minds. The

laborers work for the purpose of meeting their physical needs, but the jobs themsleves is

meaningless to their souls. Furthermore, in the Hi-Tech era, people are accelerating the speed

of consuming the resources, which makes the “planet uninhabitable for other species and

eventually for ourselves” (Grace Lee Boggs Ch. 1). Citing the example of the Montgomery

Bus Boycott of 1955-56, Grace Lee Boggs claims that the goal of this movement is not only to

desegregate the buses but to desegregate and create “the beloved community” (Ch. 1). The

forces of racism, militarism, and materialism together direct to the inhuman reality, and this is

why Grace Lee Boggs constantly appeals to humanity as the turning point to change the speedy

process of exploitation and alienation under the new era of information technology.

Grace Lee Boggs takes Wayne Curtis and Myrtle Thompson Curtis’ Feedom-Freedom

Growers project as example. Faced with the deindustrialization and industry offshoring, Detroit

kept losing job opportunities over the years. Not hoping to retrieve the jobs, Mr. and Mrs.

Curtis started the community project in 2009 featuring the slogan “grow a garden, grow a

community” in Manistique, Michigan. In the community project, Mr. and Mrs. Curtis aim at

eliminating the influence of capitalism by growing foods, holding artistic activities, and

mentoring the youth to build relationship among residents (Feedom Freedom Facebook page).

The farms in the community thus become “a gathering place for meetings of minds, a place

where history lessons and education about all things connected to life are shared” (Curtis).

Grace Lee Boggs herself also took part in the community-building activities and launched

the “City of Hope campaign” in Detroit which

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involves rebuilding, redefining, and respirating Detroit from the ground up: growing food

on abandoned lots, reinventing education to include children in community-building,

creating co-operatives to produce local goods for local needs, developing Peace Zones to

transform our relationships with one another in our homes and on our streets…. (Ch. 2)

Overseas, the Zapatistas in Mexico represents a more radical version of grassroots movement.

Grace Lee Boggs claims that the “Detroit-City of Hope campaign has more in common with

the revolutionary struggles of the Zapatistas in Chiapas than with the Russian Revolution of

1917” in that both of them put emphasis on the development of local community, self-

production and self-consumption, and communication among community members. Through

education, health care, and participatory democracy in the community, the Zapatistas breaks

out the political control from Mexican government and the financial threat from giant

enterprises.

Still, each case of local revolution varies from one another, and therefore cannot be simply

“cut and pasted.” The Zapatistas is a radical form of the examples, which even involves the

military force of guerilla troops. We ought to consider the diversity of revolutions and

community-building projects in different local contexts. Without a model of revolution to

follow, the uncertainty becomes the norm. However, according to Immanuel Wallerstein, it is

“uncertainty rather than certainty about the future provides the basis for hope” (Grace Lee

Boggs Ch. 2). In the conversation with Grace Lee Boggs, Wallerstein pointed out that the

system of capitalism has “an endless accumulation of capital,” whereas “to live well is not

necessarily to endlessly consume” (Grace Lee Boggs Afterward). Philosophy, dialectics, and

negation from within thus help escape the treadmill of capital accumulation in the world of

entire commodification. The “contradictions or negatives” arises in the process of dialectical

discussion to “break free from views that were at one time liberating but had become fetters

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because reality had changed” (Ch. 2). This is what Grace Lee Boggs calls the Hegelian negative,

the process of negating the originally correct, as the apocalypse in the new era.

The community projects in Detroit echo Orwell’s proposal in the early nineteenth century

to grow a farm and build a kitchen in the workhouse in England. At first, Orwell’s idea was

inspired by the suffocating atmosphere of boredom and the inefficient job system in the

workhouse, but regarding his hatred of the sordid environments and the tormenting regulations

in the workhouse, the community-building-like concept is pioneering from today’s viewpoint.

The reality of dehumanization has come around since imperialism in Orwell’s era to the racism,

militarism, and materialism in the US nowadays. Revisiting the possibility of community-

building can thus serve as few of the solutions to the restless society.

V. The Sociological Theory of Community-Building Projects

Along with the theoretical and historical analysis of communist revolutions above, in my

opinion, the proposal of small-scaled local communities might replace the mode of centralized

communist countries. In the Spanish Civil War, Orwell already witnessed the vice of the Soviet

Union, in which the Trotskyists were denounced as the dissidents. This totalitarian tendency is

also manifested in the Chinese Communist society, again verifying his suspicion of the static

communism during the war in Spain. With the historical facts and present experimental

movements considered, the alternative to the static communism might be the community-

building schemes, and Erik Olin Wright’s sociological hypothesis will render the picture

clearer.

In Envisioning Real Utopias, Erik Olin Wright disagrees with the traditional formulations

of socialism as “state-centered,” which “strongly link to the programs of communist parties”

(122). To envision a socialist country based on state-centered programs will inevitably lead to

totalitarianism, as seen in many communist countries in the twentieth century, such as Russia,

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China, and North Korea, to name a few. The old communist countries separate the public

policy’s interest from the civilians’ interest, leading to human-made disasters. In other words,

the communist countries lack the element of incentive structures as described in public choice

theory. The economic term “public choice,” according to Michael Makovi, “assumes moral,

behavioral, and psychological equivalence between public and private actors” (184). Public

choice focuses on the discussion of the “incentive structures” in either private business or

governmental institutions, presupposing that all human beings are self-interested, and romance

doesn’t exist in governments. On the basis of this argument, Wright proposes an idea called “a

socialism rooted in social power,” emphasizing on the strengthening of social connection and

communication between public officials and civilians, and among individuals in general (122).

Before further discussion of socialism rooted in social power, some terms and concepts in

Wright’s discussion need explanation.

Wright divides the operations of economy into three main structures: capitalism, statism,

and socialism. He asserts,

Capitalism is an economic structure within which the means of production are privately

owned and the allocation and use of resources for different social purposes is accomplished

through the exercise of economic power. Investments and the control of production are the

result of the exercise of economic power by owners of capital. (120)

By contrast, in the economic structure of statism, the state exercises its power to control the

production and investment in a country. As for socialism, it is “an economic structure within

which the means of production are socially owned and the allocation and use of resources for

different social purposes is accomplished through the exercise of what can be termed ‘social

power’” (121). In Wright’s theory, social power is contrasted with economic power and state

power.5 He argues that “the idea of ‘democracy’… can be thought of as a specific way of

5 In Wright’s context of economic structures, he defines “power” as “the effective capacity to direct the use of

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linking social power and state power” (121). And Wright elaborates on the expression “rule by

the people,” the Greek definition of “democracy,” as “rule by the people collectively organized

into associations in various ways: parties, communities, unions, etc.” instead of “rule by the

atomized aggregation of the separate individuals of the society taken as isolated persons” (121).

Wright then comes to the brief conclusion that “democracy is […] a deeply socialist principle”

(121). To juxtapose Wright’s arguments with Makovi’s analysis on public choice, the socialism

nowadays seems to be socialist democracy rather than party-state communism, and Wright

contends that the concept “socialism” cannot be separated from “democracy” (123).

However, what are the concrete forms of social democratic communities or the possible

ways of putting the concept of social power based on democracy into practice? According to

Wright, “no actual living economy has ever been purely capitalist or statist or socialist,” so he

introduces the notion, “hybrids” (123). He believes that there is no pure capitalistic country in

real world, and that modern society is mostly dominated by capitalism; therefore, it is

“capitalism which establishes the principles of functional compatibility” (126). Wright then

defines that as long as the socialist or statist elements do not undermine the healthy capitalism,

they are “functional compatible” (127). However, Wright thinks it unnecessary to resolve the

issue of compatibility on the spot. Rather, he proposes to “move in the direction of socialism

without being able to give criteria for the dominance of socialism or capitalism or statism”

(127). In this sense, Wright, Wallerstein, as well as Grace Lee Boggs all embrace the concept

of evolution and revolution, without a fixed standard or “final struggle”—the history will keep

going on and never end.

For further understanding, Wright provides an example of the Mondragón cooperatives in

Spain. According to Wright, “Mondragón cooperatives began as a single cooperative firm,

the means of production” (115). He distinguishes “three important forms of power: economic power, based on the control over economic resources; state power, based on control over rule making and rule enforcing capacity over territory; and […] social power, based on the capacity to mobilize people for voluntary collective actions of various sorts” (113).

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Ulgor, in the Basque city of Mondragón in 1956” (240). In 1991, the firm and its institutional,

educational and financial network along with other companies were “reconfigured into what is

now known as the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation (MCC)” (241). What should be

emphasized of this cooperative system is that the units of this corporation are “directly owned

by the worker-members” (241). There are also institutional designs in this corporation to help

it continue to work smoothly. First, the cooperative corporation is “governed by democratic

procedures” (242). Second, they hold “periodic General Assemblies of worker-members within

individual cooperatives” (242). Third, there are also Representative Councils in which “the

individual cooperatives choose representatives to sit on various councils and standing

committees at higher organizational levels of the MCC” (242). Fourth, “the individual

cooperatives are voluntary members of the MCC conglomerate structure and retain the right to

withdraw if they want to,” of which two profitable cooperatives which left MCC in 2008 are

the examples (243).

In spite of the strict democratic rules in MCC, with the expansion of its scale to France,

Brazil and other countries, some workers cannot be counted as members in this cooperative

corporation, but only taken as laborers receiving salary. This will undermine the democratic

principle of this organization. Wright then provides three ways to solve the dilemma that MCC

faces now. One of the possible solutions is that the cooperative can choose to “create

mechanisms to turn foreign subsidiary firms into separate self-managed cooperatives owned

and governed by the local workers” because the scale of MCC is becoming too large for

democratic principles to work well (245). This solution sheds light on the consideration of the

new social experiment in the twenty-first century: the scale of communities based on socio-

democracy needs to be small in order to be well-operated and successful, even though the

MMC members that Wright discusses do not feel that this solution will be feasible.6

6 Some MMC members think the Brazilian workers are “unreliable, and lazy and lacked the motivation needed

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The example of MCC and Grace Lee Boggs’s community-building movements reinforce

the idea of the new-type socialism, or Real Utopias, developed in the twenty-first century. In

company with Ichimura’s artistic homeless movement in Yoyogi Park, Mr. and Mrs. Kim’s

Oasis Project against the chaebol entwined with government-sponsored FACOK (Federation

of Artistic and Cultural Organizations of Korea) by squatting in the unfinished building of the

Korean Federation of Art Organizations, and Wooferten at Yau Ma Tei in Hong Kong, a

community does not have to be a group of people invariably living at certain place. It has

further developed into a fluid conglomeration. People can get together to meet their benefits

and needs, and this kind of assembly can be dismissed once its mission completed, or when the

kindness or humanity stops existing in the groups. To ensure the flexibility and effectiveness,

a community should be local and small. As the lessons learnt from CCP’s Cultural Revolution,

Badiou also points out the blind spot of the cult of Mao: “it is easier to believe in the rectitude

and the intellectual force of a distant and solitary man than in the truth and purity of an

apparatus whose local petty chiefs are well known” (152). The blind cult of the deified faraway

leader and the neglect of nearby experts oriented to the general autocracy of China. The

extremely centralized regime as China in the post-Cultural-Revolution era can be regarded as

a counter-example when we propose new ideas concerning the grassroots power against the

saturation of capitalism. In view of the historical failures, the community-building proposal,

local, small and flexible, in the twenty-first century provides us a new scope of thinking to

discover the possibility in the era of failed capitalism which keeps producing more and more

ruins and the abandoned, in particular the homeless.

to run a successful cooperative” (245). This might be related to the broader issue of ethnics and racism.

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Chapter Five: The Community Hypothesis

The title of this chapter is inspired by Alain Badiou’s work, The Communist Hypothesis.

Badiou criticizes the status quo of exploitative capitalism and analyzes the meaning of

historical communist revolutions, among which includes the Chinese Cultural Revolution. He

seeks to attach meanings to the failure of communist revolutions in history, and defines “a

space of possible failures” in which people are able to clarify and organize “points,” or

“moments” “within a truth procedure,” the procedure of seeking for the truth in life (Badiou

38-40). If James and Grace Lee Boggs’s analysis of Chinese Cultural Revolution appears to be

a pure idealism, Badiou fills the political meaning in the historical event, which allows the

contemporary to continue the dialectics of Idea of communism1. In this chapter, the Communist

Hypothesis will be borrowed as the fundamental principle, and based on the presupposition,

the community-building project might be taken as a communist possibility in the twenty-first

century. Next, humanity is always inherent in communist ideals. This ideal is also what

Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Tsai’s Stray Dogs aim to display, even though

in implicit and aestheticized ways. In the era of crippled capitalism, to revisit and rediscover

the gleams of humanity becomes more important and imperative. Last, the homeless life

presented in Stray Dogs might indicate the even tougher reality of poverty in the twenty-first

century. By investigating the literature a hundred years ago, it is not only prophetic but also

pioneering that Orwell proposes small-farm-and-kitchen project in the workhouses, and this

literary journey also reminds us of never giving up the possibility of changing for the future by

1 The capital Idea, in Badiou’s own annotation, is the imperative investigation of truth life, which “was conceived of as life lived in accordance with the Idea, as opposed to the maxim of contemporary democratic materialism, which commands us to live without any Idea” (229-30). In his later research, Badiou continues to focus on the Idea “backed up by a multifaceted commitment to something like a renaissance of the use of Plato” (230).

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reflecting upon the past and the present. The communist dialectics will not and should not be

commanded by states; instead, the revolutionary dialectics happens in everyday life, every

community, and every human being as the subjectivity, finding the truth in life.

I. The Idea of Communism

Badiou, as well as Grace Lee Boggs, Foucault, and Kao Jun-Honn, to name a few,

describes the capitalistic system to be problematic, irrational, and monstrous. The advocates of

capitalism often put emphasis on the failure of historical communism, even though they may

find capitalistic system at present desperate. In fact, both of colonial imperialism and state

communism cause huge death toll. Promoting the capitalism by underscoring the famine or

genocide of the communist countries would fall into the “propaganda machine” set by the

capitalistic camp (Badiou 3-4). In addition, the state communism did fail in the twentieth

century. The “propaganda machine” which designates the communist camp as “the Evil

Empire,” called by Reagan, has lost its point, “because there is no longer a single powerful

state claiming to be communist, or even socialist” (Badiou 2-3).

Confronting the failure of communism, Badiou contemplates the meaning of communism

and tries to preclude falling into nihilism (32). Not only are the communists, or the “ultra-left,”

faced with the failure, but the rightists also seem to give up the hope of revolutions, “rall[ying]

to the delights of parliamentary power,” which is inevitably in alliance with the empire of

capitalism because in the realm of lobbying, those who speak louder are usually financially

influential (Badiou 18). Therefore, to endow the historical failure with political significance

becomes indispensable in reconstructing and reflecting on the devastating financial crises and

declining humanitarian ideals. Communism is a political procedure that operates in every

individual, which can be called as the truth procedure. The political procedure that gradually

fills individuals and render them subjectivities, is the historical aspect of the Idea of

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Communism. In the truth procedure, “every event is a surprise,” and each plays the role of

propelling the Idea, making it possible (Badiou 255). The purpose of Idea lies in its function

“to project the exception into the ordinary life of individuals, to fill what mere exists with a

certain measure of the extraordinary” (Badiou 253). The political, historical and

“anthropological” elements together direct to the “Humanity”2 in the Idea of Communism

(Badiou 232). This is the significance of revisiting the meaning of communism, in the era of

“an utterly cynical capitalism” (Badiou 259).

II. Capitalism in literary works

The problem of the capitalistic system nowadays lies in its exploitative and inhuman

aspect that shows in every sphere of the society. From the philosophical theories to literary

works, the critiques regarding capitalism are prevalent. It is problematic that when faced with

the financial crises, the governments are always anxious to save the rich. But it is noticeable

that the rich only occupy the small proportion of the population in the world. The proverb

“money talks” can well account for this reality. To achieve economic development, freedom

and human rights can even be the bargaining chips. Badiou also points out that it is worth

suspecting that the governments choose to save the banks instead of the welfare system (5). As

the Foucauldian “commercialized nature,” Badiou adapting Stirner’s “the Ego and his own,”

concludes that the operation of capitalism at present is “Property as ego” (5).

Traced back to the early twentieth century, the image of capitalism already appears

everywhere in Down and Out in Paris and London. From the beginning, Orwell already

denotes that the life in England is not bad, “if you can pay for them” (156). During the tramping

life, counting the expenses of lodging-houses and teas is his and other tramps’ daily routine.

2 The capital Humanity refers to a universal concept of humanity that is applicable in every culture and every moment in history (Corcoran 151).

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However frugal they are, it is hard for the tramps to rise from poverty to wealth. The reasons

may vary, including their educational backgrounds, habits, physical and mental conditions, and

so on. From Orwell’s observation of Paddy, the tramps cannot even imagine what and how the

rich life is, for the rich are beyond their social horizon (175). This lack of imagination is caused

by the tramps’ limited and infertile lives. They can only survive by collecting the cigarette ends,

pawning their belongings, selling the used razor blades, sketching on the ground of pavements,

and other trivial tricks. What lies behind their miserable lives is the critical element: the

distorted structure of the society, valuing everything with money. All in all, Orwell is cautious

enough to beware that the idea of capitalism saturates every sphere in the English society. In

the twenty-first century, the situation does not improve. To certain extent, it deteriorates

because we see the rich become richer and more prosperous, but the poor remain penniless and

are still trapped in the monetary relationships. In Stray Dogs, a few scenes also reveal the sad

reality of the homeless, who are destitute but have to care about money stuffs all the times.

When the Lees have lunch together over the exit of a parking lot, the topic of their conversation

is the nutrition of the girl, Lee Yi-chieh, and the money that Lee Kang-sheng earns that day.

“Eat properly. Or we’ll have to wait for you. Eat to grow big and strong! My pay from today.

I’ll keep 100 for my smokes,” said Lee Kang-sheng. On another rainy day, Lee Kang-sheng

quarrels with Lee Yi-cheng for unknown reasons. Lee Yi-cheng refuses to give Lee Kang-

sheng the money. Lee Kang-sheng: “Yi-cheng! Yi-cheng! Yi-cheng! Can't you hear me calling?

Give me the money. Give it to me, I said! Look after your sister.”

In the thin plot and the rare dialogues of Stray Dogs, the topic about money recurs twice.

The recurrence reinforces the impression of the financial tension for the viewers. This tension

ironically contrasts to the material affluence that the supermarket (in this film, Carrefour)

alludes. The film silently demonstrates the gap between the poor and the rich, and that the

capital surplus always fails to overflow to the needed. The descriptions might not only exist in

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the literary works. Instead, the failure of the capitalism is the reality that we can perceive in

our surroundings—the homeless people on the roads, around main train stations, and the

deserted buildings that want dwelling.

III. Underlying problems of Capitalo-Parliamentarianism

The assertion that democracy is not perfect but “is by far the least bad form of government”

is irrefutable (Badiou 2). However, the banner of human rights that the free world holds,

including the rights of freedom and liberty, the freedom of owning private property, the

freedom of speech, etc., seems to be at risk in these turbulent years. In line with Grace Lee

Boggs’s argument, Badiou also points out that the closure of the borders to prevent the

foreigners from entering, the media serving particular parties or groups, and the puppet

governments of “the Mubaraks and Musharrafs who are responsible for keeping watch on the

flocks of the poor,” all operate suspiciously under the disguise of democracy (4). In addition,

the issues of climate change, financial crises, and the inequality between the rich and the poor,

are kept neglected by the parliamentary representatives in the grip of financial tycoons who

possess natural and social resources. With the distorted development of democracy, the poor’s

voice becomes weaker, and it is incongruous that there is no significant decrease in the number

of the homeless while the technology progresses enormously and the living standard is to an

extent improved during the last century. Even though the homeless are a comparative minority

in the number of the poor, when we broaden the horizons to discuss how they are related to the

social safety net and the underlying crisis of capitalism, the homelessness becomes the core

issue.

Pondering on the capitalistic failure and the communistic paradox that turns the original

ideal of wellbeing into the dehumanized regime, I ascertain that education is the crux that the

communist mass movements lack. All of the political and economic experiments in the

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communist states are carried out with the hope to establish a prosperous state that the masses

can all enjoy the fruits of developments. However, if the economy-developing experiments are

not led by the professionals or with the intervention of vocational education, the whole

economic project might look like monkey business. For instance, the intention of launching the

Great Leap Forward is to make the class division balanced and the economy thrived. However,

making the masses laissez faire on their own would possibly lead to the catastrophes, such as

economic recession and famine, brought by anti-intellectualism. To prevent and amend the

possible consequences of anti-intellectualism caused by the mass movements, I would contend

that the education plays an important role. At the same time, the possibility of class

reproduction should also be concerned. Here, the education of dialectics might prevent the

fallacy of bandwagon, that is, a group of blind people following another blind group.

Concentrating on dialectical education, the economic development might not be based on the

endless dehumanized exploitation and strata alienation. Combining with the grassroots power

in the community-building projects, the events created by different groups of multitude, in

cooperation with educated locals with lofty ideals, will possibly be the “uncertain certitudes,”

which are hopes in company with (daily-life) revolutions and changes, and the history will not

and should not cease in the devastation of capitalism (Badiou 15). In other words, the new

communist revolutions might immerse in the economic framework of capitalism and free trade

as the axis, play the role of neutralizing the catastrophic effects, and provide us with room for

humanistic contemplation.

IV. Education

Education is one of the themes in both Down and Out in Paris and London and Stray

Dogs. Other than democracy, Grace Lee Boggs also encompasses education in the dialectical

process, through group discussion to instruct and to trigger creations for the youth in

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community. In Stray Dogs, the poem Man Jiang Hong might infer that the tramping reality

will not last too long for the protagonist. Being able to sing and cry for the lines composed in

classical Chinese denotes that the protagonist is not undereducated, and being educated, even

if not well-educated, is possibly suggesting the way out of the homeless life. On the same issue,

Orwell makes profounder comments. He is concerned about not only the necessity of education,

or the literary tastes, but also the critical thinking which should be taken as the weapon against

the exploitative formulation of the society:

Paddy is a figure Orwell encounters on the roads. He is not so miserable as the homeless

who are illiterate, even though “he [has] a kind of loathing for books” (175). Nonetheless, his

topics of conversation are limited. He only talks about “the shame and comedown of being a

tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal” (174). For Orwell, “[h]is ignorance was limitless

and appalling” (174):

He once asked me [Orwell], for instance, whether Napoleon lived before Jesus Christ or

after. Another time, when I was looking into a bookshop window, he grew very perturbed

because one of the books was called Of the Imitation of Christ. He took this for blasphemy.

‘What de hell do dey want to go imitatin’ of Him for?’ he demanded angrily. (174-75)

On the way from Romton to Edbury, they pass by a public library. When Orwell invites Paddy

to come in to take a rest, Paddy rejects by saying “de sight of all dat bloody print makes me

sick,” and chooses to wait outside (175). In the following paragraphs, Orwell records Paddy’s

comments on the work and employment status. When he sees the elders working, he says

bitterly that the old men are robbing the youth of the job opportunities. He also distastes the

foreigners: “all foreigners to him were ‘dem bloody dagoes’—for, according to his theory,

foreigners were responsible for unemployment” (175).

Even though Orwell does not make further arguments, this passage is interesting and

apocalyptic in view of the xenophobia permeating in regimes that blame the high

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unemployment rate for foreign workers, or the border issues in the international situation

nowadays. During the tramping days, the observations might propel Orwell to make the

implication that some seeming theoretical but in fact anti-intellectual policy might derive from

the inadvertent knowledge spread among particular elites and the masses. With the

foreshadowing introduction of Paddy’s educational level, this passage exposes that

decontextualized critiques and lacking humanistic knowledge might bring about thoughtless

attributions or inappropriate policies.

This danger of believing in plausible theories is also present in the dialogue between

Orwell and a young carpenter out of work in Lower Binfield spike. In the introduction to the

young man, Orwell creates an atmosphere that the young man is educated by remarking that

“he [has] literary tastes, too” and mentioning that he carries “a copy of Quentin Durward in his

pocket” (209). However, the tone shifts swiftly when Orwell mentions the wastage in the

workhouse. Here is the young carpenter’s response:

‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too comfortable, you’d have all

the scum of the country flocking into them. It’s only the bad food as keeps all that scum

away. These here tramps are too lazy to work, that’s all that’s wrong with them. You don’t

want to go encouraging of them. They’re scum.’ (209)

Orwell taunts that he has “awakened the pew-renter3 who sleeps in every English workman”

(209). It is quite weird and absurd to see that a portion of tramps despise each other by

alienating themselves from the others and speak for the capital holders. Today similar discourse

is still prevalent, scorning that the homeless deserve the bad life because of their indolence,

dirtiness, love for freedom, etc., one hundred years after Orwell’s investigation. Nonetheless,

recalling Orwell’s theory that the beggars pay for their living by “standing out of doors in all

3 A pew-renter signifies the one who is able to afford the rental of the pew in church, mostly from the wealthy class.

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weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc.” and that the only mistake they

make is to “choos[e] a trade at which it is impossible to get rich,” we find that the beggars are

not lazy at all (191). They are despised simply because their business is not profitable and they

are forced to lead a filthy and indecent life. To rectify this biased cognition, what is needed is

not only compassion, but proper education of dialectics and updated sociological knowledge

should also be included so that the humanity can remain possible in the society permeated with

capitalistic ideology.

V. Humanity

No matter whether there might be the final, eternal, and universal truth, what should be

emphasized is the process of excavating the truth. Refusing to reflect on the paradox within the

communism or capitalism will result in the anti-intellectualist tendency, that is, to “Live

without an Idea” (Badiou 231, capital in the original). This thesis does not aim to defend for

party-state communist countries. Instead, the Idea of communism can be taken as a

philosophical tool to reflect upon and try to solve the social issues. Badiou’s term, “the Idea of

communism,” is constructed by elements of the political, the historical, and the subjectivities

(230). In the Idea-embedded truth procedure, the historical is the becoming that directs an

individual to develop from a biological body to a political and intellectual subject. With the

failures of static communism, Badiou denounces “a ‘State’ or ‘state of the situation’ [as] the

system of constraints that limit the possibility of possibilities,” by which he means a state

prescribes impossibilities in the possibilities, or a state makes the possibilities impossible (243).

That is, in statism, or party-state, the system limits the possible development of events and the

communist Idea. On the other hand, under the circumstances of local discussion of the

grassroots, still, he warns the precariousness of the truth procedure (243, 255). The

precariousness indicates twofold: First, the experimental discussions are not stable enough to

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hastily put into national practice. Second, the discussions are molded locally, which may not

be feasible in other situations. In search of the truth, its geographical, historical, and cultural

limitation cannot be ignored.

To equip a subject with political awareness, Badiou suggests that besides attending the

decision center of politics, the symbolic discussion of politics that makes “the real” creative

can also construct the truth procedure (254). Through brainstorming and discussing

dialectically, the possibilities occur. The happening sites of the truth procedure can be local:

A banal yet crucial discussion with four workers and a student in an ill-lit room must

momentarily be enlarged to the dimensions of Communism and thus be both what it is

and what it will have been as a moment in the local construction of the True. (Badiou 255)

But it is also because of the creativity and the precariousness of the local meeting that “the real

must be exposed in a fictional structure” (Badiou 255). To put the revolutionary ideas into

practice indeed needs more practical and realistic concerns, and it is the oscillation between

the possibilities and impossibilities that will make the history progress. The Idea, connecting

the symbolic and the real, operates within the subjectivities through debates, discussion, and

experiments, and the outcome is the yet deserted ideal of “a ‘homeland of socialism’” (Badiou

246). The ideal of socialism is reified in the truth procedure, or the dialectics in Grace Lee

Boggs’s term, and all the development orients to the general Humanity. This is why Badiou

reiterates that the “communist” in communist hypothesis cannot be taken as an adjective, “as

in ‘Communist Party’, or ‘communist regimes’” (257). “Communist” is no longer a designation

that tells people what and how to do; rather, it is a process of development, change, and

progress. The social experiments in the twentieth century have been proved to be failed;

meanwhile, the capitalistic system seems at its wit’s end. Under this circumstance, to rethink

the Idea of communism, or the Idea of Humanity, can be regarded as a new way to remain

solutions possible.

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VI. Community as the New Possibility of Communist Experiments

The term communism and community both derive from the root “common,” or commūnis

in Latin. Both of the two words indicate that human beings are social animals and commonly

live together and support each other, similar to the idea of “communes” in communist society.

In regard to the etymological and political roots, I would like to borrow the Idea of communism

to propose the feasibility of community-building projects. From the political and historical

analyses on the failure of the state-communism, we get to know that the collective

emancipation on the national scale is doomed to fail. The mass movements are unpredictable

and the catastrophes, economic or humane, may ensue. This is the nature of precariousness that

is embedded in the events. Therefore, in light of the failure of centralized nationwide mass

movements, to launch the grassroots movements, or the events, in local communities, might be

the way out of the dilemma between the failed communism and ruined capitalism. The

communities, existing or dismissed, such as Wooferten in Hong Kong, Mr. and Mrs. Kim’s

Oasis Project in South Korea, Misako Ichimura’s Blue Tent Village at Yoyogi Part, Tokyo, Mr.

and Mrs. Curtis’s Feedom-Freedom Growers, and Grace Lee Boggs’s City of Hope campaign,

all represent the grassroots power that successfully forms local communities and aims at

solving economic and educational problems and getting better lives. It is noticeable that the

gatherings resemble the “encountering” among local people, and “events” are created among

the neighborhoods. When the missions are completed, or the essential elements disappear, the

communities dismiss or transform themselves. Among the examples, only Feedom-Freedom

Growers continues to work. Wooferten has stopped running because the organization fails to

continue to use the government-owned space and lacks the funding. The Yoyogi park

occupying movement stopped in 2005, and the Oasis Project squatting movement ceased in

2007 (Kao 132). Grace Lee Boggs’s City of Hope campaign also came to a halt in 2008 from

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the record of Grace Lee Boggs’s blog. We may envision that similar buds of community can

continue to bloom one after another.

The comes and goes of the communities imply their precariousness and uncertainty. They

are not limited under national policies or economic plans, but act as the dynamic varieties or

even the reactive force under the democratic authorities. If today human beings still need to

live under the setting of governments, the communities can be regarded as the anarchic

organizations, for they organize themselves, and dismiss themselves. Grace Lee Boggs’s City

of Love had the sessions of educating the youth through sessions of dialectical discussion.

Feedom-Freedom Growers holds artistic activities for the community members to get together,

and the community members eat together to feed the needed and communicate with each other.

Wooferten preserved the local culture in Hong Kong by collecting and exhibiting the music

discs before 1990s. The Oasis Project squatted in the deserted office buildings owned by

FACOK (Federation of Artistic and Cultural Organizations of Korea), which was accused of

conspiring with the governments and embezzling the funding, causing the cultural center to

delay the construction (Kao 125). Mr. and Mrs. Kim faced the lawsuit of squatting in the

privately-owned buildings, but the husband Mr. Kim Youn-hoan claimed “if they [the squatters]

can, they will follow the laws; if needed, they will break the laws” (Kao 129). Squatting in the

buildings represents the protest against the governmental system and the chaebols as a whole

in South Korea. Misako Ichimura squatted at Yoyogi Park and held meetings with the homeless

women against Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s policies expelling the rough sleepers. The

Painting Meeting and the Tea Party for Women refused the use of money. The refusal avoided

the accusation of carrying out commercial activities without governmental approval. It also

marked the protest against the penetration of capitalism. All of the communities above have a

common goal, that is, to fight against the influence of commercialized society entwined with

the monstrous multinational enterprises and the governments kidnapped by the capitalo-

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parliamentarianism. The temporality and regionality of the “events” explain the flexibility and

fluidity of the communities in order to cope with the uncertain yet inhuman metamorphosis of

the capitalism.

Most of the organizers of the communities are the well-educated elites in the society; it

might be doubtful whether the communities represent the true voice of grassroots power. The

elites are always the vital few. Even in the vital few, not every member possesses the ability to

act and change. In Arendt’s classification, among the elites, the scientists have more capacity

of action than the administrative or diplomatic statemen in terms of their long-term studies in

the laboratories which might generate permanent influences on human beings (324). However,

the scientists might ignore the human existence, experience, and relationships because what

they concentrate is the natural relationships instead of human beings:

But the action of the scientists, since it acts into nature from the standpoint of the universe

and not into the web of human relationships, lacks the revelatory character of action as

well as the ability to produce stories and become historical, which together form the very

source from which meaningfulness springs into and illuminates human existence. (324)

Arendt continues to claim that the capacity of action is rare, which might only belong to the

minority elites, among whom include the artists:

In this existentially most important aspect, action, too, has become an experience for the

privileged few, and these few who still know what it means to act may well be even fewer

than the artists, their experience even rarer than the genuine experience of and love for the

world. (324)

Showing her concern for the development of humanity, Arendt argues that “thought” or “to

think” is the only capacity that surpass “the experience of being active” and “the various

activities within the vita activa” (325). The world cannot progress simply with actions; rather,

the actions cannot do without thought, or precisely, dialectical and reflectional thought. This

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argument corresponds with Badiou’s warning of living without any idea in the contemporary

democratic materialism, and Grace Lee Boggs’s imbuing the youth with dialectical thinking in

community discussion sessions. The human ability to think, out of the framework of

commercialized globalization, is one of the few means to fight against the entire capitalization

of the world. The artists Mr. and Mrs. Kim in Korea represent a vivid and ambivalent example,

who squatted to fight against the FACOK, also an organization about arts but conspiring with

the capitalistic power.

What scientists do might be away from the human experience, but the concept that each

atom is dynamic can be borrowed to serve as the revelation for the community-building scheme.

As stated before, the communities are organized locally and can change their system according

to the geographical, historical, and cultural needs of particular groups of people. To be more

precise, the communities are flexible but also to an extent well organized to benefit the

residents and orient toward the final victory of humanity. If “the ‘life’ in the atom” decides the

human and social experience as the cosmic rule, then the dynamics in each atom provide a

possibility outside the framework of classical physics (Arendt 323). If the parliamentary

democracy is by now the least evil political system, then the locally-based communities serve

as the rebellion against the malfunction of capitalism and the possible evil of exploitation and

oppression from the monstrous multinational enterprises in conspiracy with the governments.

It should be reasserted that the communities are different from the collective movements

of the masses propelled by the party-states. While Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities

views each nation as a collective community formed by “the interplay between fatality,

technology, and capitalism”, the concept of communities in this thesis represents the grassroots

power in contrast to the static power (43). Since the grassroots communities contradict the

notion of collective awareness of a country, they must be boomed under the political system of

democracy, which at least allow the people to express their voice. I will not try to take this

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concept to extremes by proposing and concluding with anarchism, but the hope and possibility

of probing any further should not be abandoned.

The community-building project is still a rough idea, but it may never be settled down. In

the fast-changing world, the fluidity, flexibility, and changeability of the communities

representing grassroots power in concrete form might be the starting point to rethink the

possibility of humanity. Human beings per se are also what Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris

and London and Tsai’s Stray Dogs concentrate. Only if we are aware of and forstall the

corruption of the latent materialism and entire commercialization by establishing effective,

flexible, and communicable systems, the reflection on the unjust and the biased will be

triggered and the meaning of humanity is to sprout.

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Chapter Six: Conclusion

This thesis pinpoints the discourses and contexts of humanity. Instead of regarding

humanity as an empty talk or orienting towards nihilism, the in-depth case studies in literature

might shed light on the issue of homelessness. This does not mean that the social and economic

intervention on a macro level is not necessary. Rather, Orwell’s insights from field

investigation and Tsai’s representation of the more than realistically real homeless life will

make the issue more complicated, which might touch upon the aspects in poor life stories that

are ignored by pure questionnaires or statistics.

In the London part of Down and Out, the poor live under the oppression of capitalistic

structure of the society which demands money from the most basic layer of life—to eat and

drink. They will also be expelled or prisoned by the police if they commit harmless “crimes,”

such as sleeping or begging on the streets. As for Tsai’s Stray Dogs, the change of economic

structure also produces ruined office buildings that no longer need employees. Meanwhile, the

homeless as victims of deindustrialization can only squat in the ruins without daily essentials,

such as clean water and electric power. This thesis steps further rather than purely analyzing

the texts. With the help of historical survey and sociological experiments, the whole picture of

homelessness appears meaningful, and on this basis, pondering and reflecting on the solutions

become persuasive and practical.

Humanity consists of several factors, a home, a hearth, life, human beings, human rights,

to name but a few. These are also the elements displayed in the description of the better lodging

houses in Orwell’s Down and Out and the portrait of Lee Kang-sheng in Tsai’s Stray Dogs. By

analyzing the literary and filmic masterpieces, what might be originally invisible or ignored

becomes vivid and impressive. Plus the aid of ideological and empirical philosophy, the

Nien 94

silhouette of the community-building project without governmental and capitalistic intrusion

becomes distinct and discernible. With the emotions and representation of “living” itself, the

literary study complements the cold statistics and intended objectivity of sociological research,

making the warmth of human beings perceptible.

In the world influenced by fast-developing information technology, the communication

travels so fast that the uncertainty paradoxically becomes the certitudes in daily life and

everyone is forced to engage in this evolution. This verifies the essence of the flexibly

established communities. In reference to the seemingly stable but hopeless party-state

communist countries, this type of “real utopias” composed of local communities is supposed

to operate locally and independently without much unwanted interference from the state

apparatus. It is in the reflection of historical communist failures and tragedies that the new

imagination of socialist ideals is to occur.

The transformative and changeable locally-based communities can serve against the

destructive power of international capital flow. It is also the uncertainty that makes the

community-building proposal unclear. On one hand, the readers who get no concrete

instructions might not know how and what to do. On the other, according to the lessons the

failed communist countries teach us, to list guidelines as user’s manuals or even laws and

regulations will risk dogmatizing and authoritarianizing. This might be the gap that calls for

more empirical studies and practices to fill in, and it might also be in the fissure that the

humanity is to bud.

Nien 95

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