I may be reading into this incorrectly, please correct me if so, but I believe Lenin mentioned in “What Is To Be Done?” the important roles of ‘Propagandists’ and ‘agitators’. The agitator is good for bringing up one or 2 ideas to a mass of people, whereas the propagandist provides a mass of ideas to a few people. I.E, Talking about the growing split between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Or low wages. Once the agitator does their job, there is a small group of people who are very receptive to the info and then the propagandist will convince these people of some of the core tenants of class struggle and Marxism. From what I understand, the propagandists are sort of the experts and can teach new people the ways of Marxism, while the agitator essentially creates an audience for the propagandist by preaching the problems of society and small obvious contradictions in capitalism. Once again, I haven’t finished What Is To Be Done, but that’s what I understood from it. So even if you aren’t quite an expert, you can point out problems and be an agitator
Absolutely, even Bernie Sanders is (now bear with me) an agitator to an extent when he puts out videos on YT explaining that CEOs aren’t working 350x harder than their low-paid and hard-working employees. He doesn’t do this from a Marxist perspective and a Marxist agitator will be more effective, but the message is out there regardless. Hasanabi was my route into socialism bc he was more of an agitator than anything. Parenti is more complex and could be considered a propagandist
The question is whether one is able to explain and convince. I hardly consider myself an expert on Marxism, for example.
I may be reading into this incorrectly, please correct me if so, but I believe Lenin mentioned in “What Is To Be Done?” the important roles of ‘Propagandists’ and ‘agitators’. The agitator is good for bringing up one or 2 ideas to a mass of people, whereas the propagandist provides a mass of ideas to a few people. I.E, Talking about the growing split between the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Or low wages. Once the agitator does their job, there is a small group of people who are very receptive to the info and then the propagandist will convince these people of some of the core tenants of class struggle and Marxism. From what I understand, the propagandists are sort of the experts and can teach new people the ways of Marxism, while the agitator essentially creates an audience for the propagandist by preaching the problems of society and small obvious contradictions in capitalism. Once again, I haven’t finished What Is To Be Done, but that’s what I understood from it. So even if you aren’t quite an expert, you can point out problems and be an agitator
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Absolutely, even Bernie Sanders is (now bear with me) an agitator to an extent when he puts out videos on YT explaining that CEOs aren’t working 350x harder than their low-paid and hard-working employees. He doesn’t do this from a Marxist perspective and a Marxist agitator will be more effective, but the message is out there regardless. Hasanabi was my route into socialism bc he was more of an agitator than anything. Parenti is more complex and could be considered a propagandist
If you can t explain something simply, you don t understand it