agitprop

noun

ag·​it·​prop ˈa-jət-ˌpräp 

: propaganda

You may not think that some agitprop in your Facebook feed would really get under your skin. But that is exactly what smartly tuned postings … are designed to do …

—The Daily News of Los Angeles

especially : political propaganda promulgated chiefly in literature, drama, music, or art

Ample and gorgeous evidence … that all was not agitprop in Russia's postrevolutionary culture.

—Sada Fretz

… turning to studio heads to churn out the sort of rah-rah agitprop released during World War II …

—Graydon Carter

… [Joshua] Harmon reserves some of his powerful soliloquies for characters who probably oppose his private, personal opinions. That is the difference, of course, between art and agitprop.

—Samuel G. Freedman

agitprop adjective

agitprop theater

agitprop films/songs/posters

an agitprop campaign

Never has the Kremlin's agitprop mill cooed more seductively …

—Richard Poe

Examples of agitprop in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Chahine films the story with uninhibited sympathy for the cause but without the inflated optimism of agitprop, and presents living history in all its complexity. —Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 19 Mar. 2024

But Carlson insisted at the outset of his interview that the Russian president’s views are sincerely held, and the onetime KGB intelligence officer’s rhetoric was so shot through with Bolshevist agitprop that the former Fox host may be right. —Noah Rothman, National Review, 9 Feb. 2024

But if wages are stagnating in the middle at the same time, that’s politically treacherous, because morally decent middle-class workers will wonder why their wages aren’t rising, too, and morally indecent middle-class workers will spew race hatred and other toxic MAGA agitprop. —Timothy Noah, The New Republic, 12 July 2023

Anti-gay agitprop had been a staple of Hollywood for decades; what was pro-gay agitprop but a long-overdue attempt to fight fire with fire? —Mark Harris, New York Times, 17 Aug. 2023

Top Stories The new standards were approved by the Florida Department of Education last week as part of the state’s effort to free itself from the dictates of the College Board and other national groups pushing left-wing agitprop. —The Editors, National Review, 25 July 2023

In the summer of 2015, it is alleged, a Chinese national who was the head of something called the China Energy Fund Committee, or CEFC, approached Luft and offered him and his think tank $350,000 a year to engage in some pro-China agitprop. —Michael Tomasky, The New Republic, 14 July 2023

Hollywood’s reluctance to deal with contemporary America’s complicated, divisive realities produces either Diversity Inclusion Equity (DIE) agitprop or puerile diversion. —Armond White, National Review, 12 May 2023

Part agitprop invective about Puerto Rican independence, part miniaturized drag spectacle, Mara Vélez Meléndez’s play deliberately confuses categories, scrambling them together to establish a spurious comparison: the freedom of Puerto Rico as a metaphor for internal liberation (or vice versa). —Helen Shaw, Vulture, 31 May 2022

Word History

Etymology

borrowed from Russian Agitprop, shortened from Agitacionnopropagandistskij otdel "Agitation-Propaganda Section (of the Central Committee, or a local committee, of the Communist Party)"; later used for the head of such a section, or in compound names of political education organs, as agitpropbrigada "agitation-propaganda brigade"

Note: Russian agitpróp was probably first used in the names of state organs, then generalized as a shortening of agitatsiya i propaganda "agitation and propaganda," though the chronology is uncertain. In the latter sense well-known in Russian at least from the time of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem Vo ves' golos (1928-30), containing the line "i mne agitprop v zubakh navyaz" ("and I was sick and tired of agitprop," literally, "and agitprop stuck in my teeth").

First Known Use

1925, in the meaning defined above