In response to the hectic state of the media in his time, Émile Zola recommended a simple solution: eating a toad. The recommendation was used in the opening lines of blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s The Time of the Toad to cope with his own times, that of the anti-communist McCarthy era.
However, it seems like history is again repeating itself—with so many companies, under the threat of Trump’s executive orders, rolling over to abolish any semblance of equity in hiring practices—and we again find ourselves in rather toad-like times, returning with bewilderment to the blacklisted writer.
I keep stumbling across the scene from the 2015 film Trumbo in which the Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, played by Bryan Cranston, is asked by his daughter whether she’s a communist.
“Well, why don’t we give you the official test,” he suggests. Trumbo proceeds to ask if she would share her ham sandwich with a hungry classmate and with her responding in the affirmative, he goads her. “Wait, you don’t tell them to just go get a job? Oh, you offer them a loan at 6%, oh that’s very clever. Ah then you just ignore them.” “No,” she says. “Well,” he concludes as he grabs her chin, “you little commie.”
The scene is a bit cringy. It’s one of the only moments in the film where Trumbo specifically talks about communism, and it happens to be in reference to that true bastion of proletarian liberation, a ham sandwich. But there’s a deeper meaning to Trumbo’s metaphors about consuming amphibians and artisanal sandwiches. But first, we have to understand the place of Marxist art in the time before a communist revolution.
Better than standard mush
Despite the entertaining title of this article, Trumbo’s movies had little to do with communism. Few references to class struggle can be found in romantic comedies like Roman Holiday or Kitty Foyle. His films were popular and largely apolitical. This was partially due to the Communist Party’s “popular front” strategy that sought the broadest possible coalition against fascism, working with and rallying anyone opposed to fascism, and partially because he was writing scripts full-time for studios that happened to be run by right-wing finance capitalists.
The latter is often forgotten by critics of cultural figures like Trumbo. Contemporary historians like Maurice Isserman and Paul Buhle are suspicious of the period, calling into question the effectiveness of popular front art in America. In his 1987 book Marxism in the United States, Buhle argued that Communist cultural figures confined themselves to a Communist bubble, yet accused them on the same page of being too mainstream and apolitical to the point of simply creating morally “better” entertainment than “standard mush” without the Marxist theory to back it.
We should call into question the effectiveness of these historians with their thorough knowledge of Communist Party figures and events without any understanding. Their works offer profound truths with a severe lack of meaning.
A fight against demons
Revolutionary culture, as contemplated among numerous Communist theorists, including revolutionary leaders like Lenin and Castro, is unavoidably tied up with certain economic and social prerequisites.
In the late Frederic Jameson’s 2009 book Valences of the Dialectic, he contemplated these various circumstances floating between our “superstructure”—the social and cultural aspects of society—and the “base”—the economic laws that run society. In the chapter titled “Cultural Revolution,” he examines the different cultural routes taken in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, Vietnam, and Yugoslavia, finding that the people of each country had to arrive at their own conclusions based on their material conditions. In capitalist countries, it’s a different story.
As Trumbo put it in The Time of the Toad: “The truth of the matter is that philosophies and systems of thought, like rivers and rocks and universes and men, change as new times confront them with new conditions.” (He quoted Stalin in the next paragraph, who similarly said that “Marxism does not recognize any immutable deductions and formulas, applicable to all epochs and periods.”)
In Willis Truitt’s 2005 book Marxist Ethics, he divides Marxist art into two historical phases: “The first encompasses the class war against bourgeois culture prior to successful revolution. The second involves the task of building socialism after the revolution.” It’s in the first phase that artists have to perform a balancing act to make a living and bring about social change. This is where oppositional art is important, fighting against false consciousness, morality, and total capitulation to institutions of the status quo.
The 1930s and ’40s saw an influx of what was called “proletarian culture,” or literature and films about working class stories—Grapes of Wrath, Native Son, and Mike Gold’s Jews Without Money. It was Gold who argued that artists should go a step further to give the viewer tools to fight back—through depictions of union struggles and strikes, especially. He called this “proletarian realism” (and there are far fewer and less popular examples of this in the U.S.—Pete Seeger and other Communist folk singers being a prime example).
Trumbo then, in his films largely trapped within the superstructures of Hollywood and D.C., can’t be a revolutionary Eisenstein or a Pudovkin promoting socialist revolution. Instead, he is a Juan Contreras—the character in Tomas Gutiérrez Alea’s A Cuban Fight Against Demons, stuck in his lifetime, a period that could be centuries away from a true revolution. Contreras was stuck in the 17th century with the Spanish colonial government and the Catholic Church. Trumbo had a head start, living through the 20th century, which despite the vast working-class wins did not, of course, result in a Soviet America.
Transcend the toad
Perhaps the irony of the digestible toad that makes overwhelming fascistic news bearable is that Communist ideology has a similar effect. It is the Communists, with their class analysis and history of fighting fascism, who are least surprised to learn today that decades of neoliberalism has led to fascism.
It was the Communist Party USA economist Victor Perlo who in the 1980s emphasized the radical shift in a segment of finance capitalists towards fascism in the Reagan era. What separates the toad from the Communist, however, is the scientific study of capitalism. Whereas the toad produces indigestion, Communist ideology offers clarity. Whereas the toad provides no reports or studies on the matters of dismantling bourgeois democracy, the Communists have Dimitrov’s report to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International and Togliatti’s Lectures on Fascism.
If the Marxists are correct that we are still engaged in pre-revolutionary art in America, then we inevitably arrive at questions of freedom and ethics, and both are exposed as being connected to economics. Eisenstein revolutionized cinema under a Communist government, but couldn’t make anything in Hollywood while Trumbo could only challenge bourgeois ethics and culture as far as someone was willing to finance it (films like Johnny Got His Gun and Spartacus are far more political than his romcoms, for example, but they’re not Eisenstein’s Strike!).
The political results are, similar to Buhle’s characterization, a better ethics than capitalist culture, but unlike Buhle’s characterization, this ethics is based within society and all its limitations (as opposed to an idealistic or utopian view alienated from reality).
And so, we return to the ethics of the ham sandwich. Although it is common both among intellectuals and Marxists to dismiss Marxist ethics, we have to ask how free a society is that claims to prioritize rights over needs.
In Marxist Ethics, Truitt shows how “value systems are class-relative” and how “rights” trumping needs in capitalist countries actually just limits freedom. Having the right to publish a book doesn’t mean anything if you didn’t have the education to teach you how to read. (It’s telling that Republicans stripping away money from unions was done under the label “right-to-work.”)
So, the fictional Trumbo’s ham sandwich ethics reflects Marx’s criticisms of capitalism’s ethics of “naked self-interest” and resolving “personal wealth into exchange value”—although the nonfictional Trumbo took it a step further to actually engage in political and class struggle (partaking in campaigns and strike efforts). Toads and ham sandwiches are equally unappetizing to me, however. I prefer eggs and the philosophical questions they pose. But if you’re wondering why the news looks the way it does, don’t be afraid to listen to the Communists.
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