Toy Story 3 as Marxist Allegory
Like all great stories of Marxist awakening, Toy Story 3 features an epiphany where the protagonists understand the rot of the system. This occurs in the middle third of the film, when Jessie, Rex, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head, and other characters realize that Sunnyside Daycare is a nightmarish, capitalist hellhole. He explains the conceit of the Daycare, where an elite aristocracy of “keeper” toys get to be played with in luxury, while the rest of the toys are thrown to the infants and worn to pieces. If the toys “work their way up”, they can join the ranks of the “keepers”.
Friedrich Engels experienced this epiphany while living among the poor factory workers of England in the Industrial Revolution. Peter Kropotkin learned the truth while working among the peasants of Siberia. The realization that system is rigged to benefit a select few at the expense of all the rest comes for all socialists. The wrenching inequality and despicable unfairness of unchecked oligarchic capitalism haunts us all.
“This isn’t a family, it’s a prison!” Jessie screeches.
Lotso is the preeminent capitalist shithead. He starts out nice. He promises many material benefits. However, he later turns out to be a two-faced liar. The new toys are all exploited, often worked until death or destruction. It’s horrible. His authoritarian rule and naked exploitation are buttressed by his powerful aristocracy. As Ken notes in the film, Lotso ruined the daycare and “put himself at the top of the pyramid”.
The greedy nihilism of oligarchs is their greatest asset and most egregious sin.
“We’re all just toys waiting to be thrown away!” Lotso says. He might as well be a conservative doomsayer arguing that climate change is inevitable, or that poor people are fated to be worked to death.
In the end, as is the result of all capitalist endeavors, they end up surrounded by the garbage of overconsumption and slated for destruction. Even when the toys, through their natural compassion, save him from being torn to pieces in the final landfill sequence, he leaves them to die in the dump anyway.
This is the scene best remembered by the public, the toys holdings hands in the face of certain death by garbage incinerator. This is how the working class will meet its fate, unified as they are fed to the flames by the oligarchs. Will they be saved?
Of course, since this is a children’s movie, they are saved. However, the ultimate legacy of the Toy Story 3 Marxist interpretation is up for debate. The toys are saved by a literal deus ex machina (god from the machine), through the collective efforts of the aliens from Pizza Planet. Yet is this a reflection on technological advancement being what saves the working class? Is it the next generation of children? Or is this a tacit acknowledgement that only some kind of divine intervention or revolution can deliver the working class.
Overall, Toy Story 3 is an imperfect description of Marxist doctrine, but it does do a good job of convincing viewers to empathize with the struggles of the working class.
