Journalism…
Agitprop reborn
Media literacy is crucial to critically assessing information and resisting manipulation. It includes the ability to decode art works and graphic design that has been weaponised to convey, overtly or subtly, a political message.
The image of a strong working-class figure superimposed with an industrial hammer over the agricultural sickle held by the Statue of Liberty evokes powerful historical associations. This visual draws on the hammer-and-sickle emblem of the Soviet Union and the actions and emotions tied to its legacy.
The generative AI artwork was produced as a response to the Trump administration’s alignment with Russia’s political agenda in early 2025 and it links back to the historical context of the Bolshevik Revolution over a century ago.
The second photo illustrates how a real-world action can be turned against its maker when combined with words, a superimposed image and a font suggestive of Hitler’s Germany. It illustrates the way that art has served agitprop.
The historical context
Agitation propaganda, or agitprop, emerged in the Soviet Union following the Russian Revolution of 1917. It harnessed art forms such as theatre, music and poster art to build support for the agenda of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Influenced by modern artistic movements, agitprop emphasised the role of art as the handmaiden of politics through dynamic compositions and striking visuals in design. This approach aligned with Constructivism, a movement initiated by Russian artists Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, that sought to reflect modern industrial society through austere, abstract forms.
Propaganda: communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response.
In contemporary times, agitprop has evolved to encompass any artistic work conveying a political or social message. While its roots are firmly planted in Soviet history, the concept has now become a widely used tool for political activism, addressing social issues across both digital and physical platforms. Notably, street artist Banksy exemplifies modern agitprop, using his politically charged artwork to critique social and environmental issues, war and capitalism.
Agitprop: form and Function
American architect Louis Sullivan famously articulated the principle that ‘form follows function,’ suggesting that an object’s structure should reflect its purpose. He was talking about buildings, however his idea extends to agitprop‘s graphic design where the function is to support a political ideology, message or program, and the form is derived from modern art and design trends.
Graphic design intended as agitprop during the early Soviet era employed bold typography, strong colours and geometric shapes as design elements to convey political messages. These design choices created an industrial aesthetic with specific meanings: rectangles and squares symbolise stability; circles represent unity; triangles convey dynamism; straight lines emphasise precision. Clear, sans-serif fonts promoted clarity and directness and for visual effect were sometimes combined with serif fonts, while asymmetrical compositions added visual energy.
The colour pallette was limited and colour played a crucial role. Red, often the dominant colour, connotes revolution and power, particularly in the context of the Bolshevik Revolution where it symbolised the working class’ foundational role. The visual impact of red, frequently contrasted with black or white, enhanced the political message. Dynamic, asymmetrical layouts further contributed a visual energy, distinguishing it from the balanced formalism of traditional graphic design.
Poster art retained importance as a means of conveying the ideas of political movements in societies where literacy was limited.
The Chinese Context
The art of agitprop saw a revival in the 1950s and 1960s with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. Unlike the abstract art of Soviet agitprop, Chinese poster art prominently featured idealised human figures often depicted in heroic poses, including soldiers, agricultural and industrial workers. The intent was to disseminate the Communist Party’s political messages to a domestic audience.
Translated into English, Chinese revolutionary poster art took the Party’s messages international. I think it was the East Wind Bookshop in downtown Sydney that in the later years of the 1960s introduced Chinese political poster art to Australia. The bookshop, as I understand it, was run by a Marxist group that may have been affiliated with the Communist Party of Australia, which remained Stalinist in political direction.
Mao’s regime employed agitprop through various mediums, including theatre, song and poster art to mobilise public support for the Communist ideology. State-sanctioned performances dramatised revolutionary themes, celebrating the Communist Party and denouncing counterrevolutionaries. Likewise, brightly coloured posters showcased heroic imagery and slogans that conveyed key revolutionary messages, often centralising Mao’s image to foster loyalty and in doing so creating a personality cult around him.
Modern agitprop and the digital age
In the late-1960s and early-1970s in the West, poster art was important in notifying people about the mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. The posters also carried other, more general messages about the war and would be pasted onto city walls in the dead of night. The difference to the bright primary colours and idealised human figures of the Maoist posters, and the modernist Constructivist art with its geometric shapes and bold, sans-serif fonts of the early years of the Russian Revolution was that the anti-war posters of the late sixties and the early years of the following decade were often text-based. What is interesting is that the poster art of the late-1960s hippie and rock music scene, which rebirthed the graphic design of the turn-of-the-20th-Century Art Nouveau movement, did not carry over into the anti-war/New Left movement even though many of its participants would have been familiar with it.
Poster art persisted as agitprop and as a means of rallying people through the 1970s and into the following decade. Like other print media it started to disappear with the coming of digital communication.
Today, agitprop is primarily disseminated through online platforms where it plays a significant role in shaping public perceptions. Through manipulated photographs, deep fake videos, manipulative misinterpretation of images and events and spreading lies, the agents of disinformation and those who—lacking the ability to distinguish between disinformation and reality and who in so doing are what Cold War Russia’s KGB called ‘useful idiots’—become agitprop actors whether they know it or not.
The digital landscape is the greatest gift to producers of agitprop because it blurs the lines between fact and opinion. The unregulated nature of the internet undermines critical thinking and significantly influences public perception and belief. Its mission: weaken democratic societies by sowing distrust of government and institutions like science, media and medicine; sow distrust between citizens by polarising attitudes and beliefs and shrinking the intellectual and political space between them; create a situation in which people do not know what to believe.
Now, there is a countercurrent running against the purveyors of disinformation as agitprop. It is no longer the exclusive property of malicious regimes and their dezinformatorov (disinformers), to borrow a Russian term, that are traditionally associated with political messaging to influence public perceptions and manipulate beliefs. Agitprop can be a powerful tool to combat their disinformation and to mobilise a culture of opposition to counter the disinformers. Just as agitprop did in the years of its inception in Revolutionary Russia, today it blends art, design, performance and creative messaging that resonates with audiences and inspires them to act.
Agitprop can be used by pro-democracy and pro-freedom forces to effectively convey factual counterinformation against disinformation and to mobilise people against its agents and their useful idiots, to adopt the KGB description. Avenues being used to do this include educating the public about misinformation and who creates and spreads it and why, by providing context and background to current events and using compelling visuals and clear messaging to discredit false narratives.
The positive use of agitprop can encourage audiences to question sources of information and think critically about what they consume from media, colleagues and friends, and make a call to action to engage in activism, support fact-checking initiatives and engage in discussions around the critical need for media literacy.
Through fostering a sense of shared purpose and identity, agitprop can unite individuals and organisations who are committed to promoting truth and transparency. Social media platforms would be the chosen media as they can be leveraged to disseminate positive, evidence-based agitprop widely and rapidly and distribute a counternarrative.
Contemporary agitprop employs modern media to educate and mobilise audiences around social and political issues, paralleling historical propaganda methods that used graphic design to shape narratives and suppress dissent. The legacy of Constructivism continues to inspire global movements, utilising art for activism and redefining its role in mass communication.
Media literacy is essential in this context, enabling individuals to decode artworks and graphic designs that convey political messages. Understanding the intent behind these messages is crucial, as it highlights the broader attempt to manipulate perceptions and beliefs. As media analyst Marshall McLuhan famously stated, “the medium is the message.”
