Transmission Belts Are Not What Lenin Thought: The Cultural Legacy of Suze Rotolo
March 3, 2011
V. I. Lenin (Ulyanov) had a theory of revolution. He believed that radical social change is accomplished by control over institutional transmission belts. These transmission belts spread ideas through dedicated organization by a minority. Lenin believed that the Russian Communist Party should use the trade union movement to influence the minds of the workers.
A few months after Lenin's death in January 1924, Stalin gave a series of speeches titled Foundations of Leninism. He said this about organization for revolution.
The Party possesses all the necessary qualifications for this because, in the first place, it is the rallying centre of the finest elements in the working class, who have direct connections with the non-Party organizations of the proletariat and very frequently lead them; because, secondly, the Party, as the rallying centre of the finest members of the working class, is the best school for training leaders of the working class, capable of directing every form of organization of their class; because, thirdly, the Party, as the best school for training leaders of the working class, is, by reason of its experience and prestige, the only organization capable of centralizing the leadership of the struggle of the proletariat, thus transforming each and every non-Party organization of the working class into an auxiliary body and transmission belt linking the Party with the class.
In the United States in the early 1940s, one family believed this: the Rotolos. The husband and wife were Communist Party members. They reared their newborn daughter to be an activist in Party affairs. Her name was Suze.
It was a completely different kind of affair that gave Suze Rotolo cultural leverage. She hooked up with a young Bob Dylan in 1961, shortly after he had arrived, guitar in hand, from Minneapolis. She moved in with him. She spend four years with him. By all accounts, she radicalized him.
For Dylan fans in the spring of 1962, his newly released Columbia album was a refreshing mixture of traditional folk songs and recent songs written in that vein. They were not leftist or radical. I can remember thinking, "I hope that old man lives long enough to record another album." I recorded four tracts from his Bob Dylan album off Les Claypool's FM radio show. Claypool had the only all-folk music radio show in Southern California. He had a niche market. He introduced Dylan to the West Coast. Yet in 1965, as his career was taking off, Dylan had never heard of him.
I remember reading the liner notes about Suze Rotolo, who accompanied him to the studio. I had no idea how influential she would become.
She was featured on the cover of his second album, released in 1963. It was the last Dylan album I ever bought.
Dylan came to New York City from Minneapolis in 1961, which would soon bring us the extraordinary white blues group Koerner, Ray and Glover, and before the decade was over, the equally extraordinary Leo Kottke. They did not sing protest songs. Neither had Dylan before he met Suze Rotolo.
Rotolo's influence changed him. He moved into the protest category within two years. In what was a resounding refutation of Marxist social theory, his influence was cultural. It began in what Marx called the superstructure of society. It had nothing to do with the mode of production. It had far more to do with the mode of consumption: young adults with a lot of discretionary time and money on their hands.
The social revolution of the second half of the 1960s was international. The man who best represented the comprehensive nature of that revolution was Dylan. He sang its songs, and millions of fans bought them. The shift in content of his songs was initiated by Rotolo. There were more deeply politically committed singers, such as Phil Ochs, but they never had the influence that Dylan had.
It was not the trade union movement that launched that revolution. It was the music. That transmission belt validated Antonio Gramsci's theory of social revolution at the expense of Marx's and Lenin's. Gramsci, the head of the Italian Communist Party in 1924, was imprisoned from 1926 to 1934 by the Fascists. He died at age 46 in 1937. From prison, he wrote his prison notebooks. He denied the centrality of the structure of production. He knew that the trade unions in the West were bread-and-butter organizations, anxious to get a larger piece of capitalism's action. He saw that the war was cultural: a war against the West's Christian roots.
It was not Mr. and Mrs. Rotolo who moved American culture away from its roots. It was their daughter's consort.
Suze Rotolo died on February 24. Her obituaries were well deserved. By moving Bob Dylan away from the folk music of Minneapolis, she pushed on a lever that changed America.
Bob Dylan was a transmission belt. He was not a transmission belt of the Communist strategy expressed by Lenin. He was a transmission belt of the Communist strategy expressed by Gramsci -- the denial of Marxist cause and effect.
Ideas have far greater consequences than party discipline. Culture is more a reflection of ideas than of the mode of production. I can think of no better example of this than the social leverage of Suze Rotolo. She was a red diaper baby, but her influence came as a result of her social causes, not her Communist ideology at the age of 17 to 21. Dylan did not preach Communist revolution or worker solidarity. He preached opposition to the remnants of Christian culture in many areas of life.
In the late 1960s, I carried a card in my wallet that I had typed: "I don't care what Bob Dylan means." As far as I was concerned, I was not going to take him up on his offer in his 1963 album, with Suze on the cover: "Honey, just allow me one more chance." I never did.
Suze had the leverage. Lenin didn't.