‘Agitprop’ used to be the bread-and-butter of radical movements aiming to change the order of things. It meant stirring the masses into action, mostly to follow a partisan roadmap pointing to socialism or to mobilize their latent energies for various anarchist initiatives, although later fascist and populist movements adopted it as standard practice too. Activists engaged in agitprop in a variety of ways, whether by extolling the virtues of the party line amongst trade unionists, selling partisan press in the streets, publishing pamphlets attacking the government as well as the rich and the powerful, or denouncing class-divided society as the source of the wretched condition of the people. This was its pedagogic role, educating the masses for action. They also confronted their adversaries, organized strikes and demonstrations, and occasionally embarked on ‘armed propaganda’ consisting of exemplary direct actions, like robbing banks to finance the organization's activities or setting bombs (often in government buildings) to frighten their enemies and elicit enthusiasm amongst their followers. This was the ideological and political role of agitation. Both the pedagogic and the ideological-political aspects were meant to justify the group's fitness to lead and to show that another world was both desirable and possible. This made agitprop an integral part of emancipatory politics.

Today the term ‘agitprop’ has lost its political lustre and groups outside the ideological fringe have all but abandoned it. It survives as a hip term amongst ‘hacktivists’ and culture bloggers and in the narratives of historians and erstwhile sympathizers of socialism and trade unionism. Talk about emancipation, central to radical politics from 1789 to 1968, has come to be seen as an anachronism in the context of liberal-democratic consensus.