Agitprop

Agitprop (pronounced aj-it-prop)

(1) A form of propaganda, emanating originally from the USSR but later more generally applied.

(2) A (usually disparaging) term for an agency or department of government or corporation which directs or coordinates publicity, advertising or other activities which may be classed as propaganda.

(3) A person (technically an agitpropist) who is trained or takes part in such activities.

(4) Of or relating to agitprop; an instance of such propaganda.

1920s: From the Russian агитпро́п (agitprop), from отде́л агитации и пропаганды (otdél agitacii i propagandy) (Department for Agitation and Propaganda), the construct in English being agit(ation) + prop(agenda), the Russian agitatsiya a borrowing from the French agitation while propaganda was gained from the German which picked it up from the Roman Catholic Church, the ecclesiastical Latin from the New Latin propāganda which was thought to be the ablative feminine gerundive of the Classical Latin prōpāgō (propagate).  The Congregātiō dē Prōpāgandā Fidē (the official title sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando (the sacred congregation for propagating the faith)), was a committee of cardinals created in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623; pope 1621-1623) to supervise foreign missions.  The original Agitation Propaganda Section of the USSR’s Central Committee of the Communist Party in the USSR appeared in contemporary documents variously as Agitpróp, Agitatsiónno-propagandístskiĭ otdél, Agitpropbrigáda and Agitpropbyuro, reflecting the frequent bureaucratic and administrative changes in the early days of the Soviet state.  Agitprop is a noun and a verb and agitpropist is a noun; the noun plural is agitprops.  Variations (agitpropesque, agitproplike et al) have been used as non-standard adjectives and although no one seems to have concocted an adverb, dictionaries note the present participle agitpropping (used as a noun & adjective) and the past participle agitpropped.  The alternative spelling is agit-prop.

Agitprop began in the Soviet Union but was co-developed to its definitive forms under fascism, a political system much concerned with spectacle.

Agitprop is political propaganda disseminated through art, drama, literature etc and is historically associated with communist regimes, its origins in the material disseminated by the Department for Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.  Like the less overtly atheistic Nazis, the Bolsheviks learned much from the techniques the Roman Catholic Church had developed over the centuries and even Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) who habitually referred to priests as “those black crows” never tried to hide his grudging admiration for an institution which had endured and prospered for two thousand-odd years.

The Church’s sacra congregatio christiano nomini propagando (the sacred congregation for propagating the faith), established in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV (1554–1623; pope 1621-1623) was a propaganda operation created to manage communications with the new countries then recently discovered and also to supervise the new system of government by congregations adopted during the Counter-Reformation.   For the Church, of interest was both the re-conquest of severed lands and the evangelization of the vast populations in regions then becoming known through the expeditions of European explorers, not all of whom were Catholic.  The theological cold war of the age was the contest between the doctrines of Rome and those of the dreaded Protestantism.

In the 1920s, the Red Army used both trains and trucks as mobile agitprop units, the trains often equipped with printing presses which enabled the graphic artists to create regionalized variations of the material.

Although the results achieved by the sacred congregation ebbed and flowed with because it was so dependent on the energy and priorities of the members of the committee, it succeeded as a propaganda project and many of the territories in Africa, Asia and South America (as well as some re-claiming of souls in Europe) which remain today predominately Roman Catholic are due to the efforts which began in the seventeenth century.  The objectives of the early Bolsheviks was strikingly similar in that their task of evangelization was one of spreading to all the gospel of communism so that the Marxist prediction of a world-wide revolution might be realized.  To the techniques borrowed from the Church the Russians added the novelties now so associated with agitprop, the colors and practices of graphic art which were mapped on to the stark simple imagery known in religious iconography and stained glass windows.  The method remained the same: a simple message, endlessly repeated and presented in a form which changed just enough to keep the viewers interested, the need for text kept to a minimum so it was suitable for the illiterate likely to be among the most receptive audiences.  Innovative too was the idea of agitprop as a moving thing, trains and trucks loaded with material to be distributed far and wide.

So distinctive is the classic agitprop poster that it remains in use as a political message implying dictatorship.  Inevitably, it’s popular also with meme-makers.

Agitprop was thus overt political propaganda, understood as such by some and to others just another form of religion, temptingly offering something tangible in this life rather than paradise in the next.  Designed to produce political consequences, it spawned a number of forks, the best known of which were those distributed through popular media such as theatre, cinema and pamphlets and although agitprop literature did exist, agitprop was so inherently visual that even in those few –laces where radio existed, impact was limited.  Soon after the October Revolution of 1917, an agitprop train toured the country, broadcasting propaganda and staging plays.  On board was a printing press which reproduced posters to be thrown from the windows as it passed through even the tiniest villages.  The Soviet’s train inspired agitprop theatre, a politicized left-wing theatre formed in 1920s Europe which soon spread to the rest of the western world.  An international and briefly influential theatre movement, it’s most associated with the work of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), Joan Littlewood (1914-2002) and a myriad of groups such as Red Ladder and 7:84 which emerged during the mid-twentieth century.  Despite this, agitprop is essentially a footnote in theatre history, probably because its historical moment passed, its techniques and styles becoming absorbed into mainstream, bourgeois theatre.  In its early form a didactic form of mass-propaganda, the word agitprop had, by the 1950s, come to mean a kind of highly politicized art although, having become just another mass-produced commodity, classical, two-dimensional agitprop imagery exists now in something of an ironic space.

Lindsay Lohan agitprop.