For a time I've been unsatisfied with the common conception of agitation and propaganda in Leninism. The only place I'm aware of where Lenin talks specifically of what agitation and propaganda are, is in a few paragraphs in What Is To Be Done?:
[...] the propagandist, dealing with, say, the question of unemployment, must explain the capitalistic nature of crises, the cause of their inevitability in modern society, the necessity for the transformation of this society into a socialist society, etc. In a word, he must present “many ideas”, so many, indeed, that they will be understood as an integral whole only by a (comparatively) few persons. The agitator, however, speaking on the same subject, will take as an illustration a fact that is most glaring and most widely known to his audience, say, the death of an unemployed worker’s family from starvation, the growing impoverishment, etc., and, utilising this fact, known to all, will direct his efforts to presenting a single idea to the “masses”, e.g., the senselessness of the contradiction between the increase of wealth and the increase of poverty; he will strive to rouse discontent and indignation among the masses against this crying injustice, leaving a more complete explanation of this contradiction to the propagandist. Consequently, the propagandist operates chiefly by means of the printed word; the agitator by means of the spoken word. The propagandist requires qualities different from those of the agitator.
This is in the context of a polemic with Rabocheye Delo, over the conceptions of economist and political struggle. The question of agitation and propaganda is more of a side question due to the newspaper's attempt to deepen or correct the view defended by Plekhanov and later Lenin, which in this book only appears as a single sentence (a quotation within a quotation):
A propagandist presents many ideas to one or a few persons; an agitator presents only one or a few ideas, but he presents them to a mass of people.
Rabocheye Delo essentially attempts to define agitation by the fact that it proposes immediate action to the masses, whereas Lenin defends that both propaganda and agitation have this element.
Besides the seminal approach to economic and policial struggle established in this chapter, the question of what propaganda and agitation actually are has always felt very incomplete and excessively schematic or formalist. Luckily, Rabocheye Delo has the decency to mention the work they're quoting Plekhanov in: Tasks of the Socialists in the Fight Against the Famine in Russia. Published in 1892, this text was one of, if not the text that essentially germinated into the strategy and tactics of the Bolshevik party, even if Plekhanov himself was a decided Menshevik, about a decade after writing these lines. This work was surprisingly (to me) not in marxists.org, and it took more time to search for the original text in full than I would have expected for such an important piece of bokshevik history. Even then I could only find the full thing on a trotskyist blog with pretty useless comments from a "Sean Matgamna". It is also uploaded by itself to scribd, but missing the first half of the text, which contextualizes the exposition of agitation and propaganda.
As a summary (though I highly recommend reading it), Plekhanov does not really make such a compartmentalized distinction between agitation and propaganda. One bleeds into the other; agitation is a form of propaganda for Plekhanov, and agitation is the goal of propaganda. Agitation isn't simply giving speeches and putting up posters, it is the tool with which the Party makes its intended leadership real, the transmission that allows communists to interface with the total of the working class, and aid in its historical, revolutionary movement. Agitation, nevertheless, isn't "telling the masses what's what" in a paternalistic sense. The agitator "gives the mass nothing". The skill of agitation is being able to put into words and plans of action the will that is already present among workers, of not saying too little (and becoming an "agitator-brake") and not saying too much (and being ridiculous and maximalist).
Propaganda's only purpose is to make agitation possible. Its effects are limited quantitatively, since it is only ever intended for a reduced, already "agitated" audience, but great qualitatively; agitators for the Party become so when they've become convinced of the communist programme, by the means of propaganda. Through the continuous reciprocal movement between agitation and propaganda, the Communist Party is built from and within the working class itself; a gradual, and then accelerated, actualization of portions of the working class which subsequently turn to their class as a whole, to start the cycle again. It is the self-reproduction of class consciousness.
This is, in my opinion, a much more fundamental and actually useful piece of theory to understand and apply agitation and propaganda, and until I went on my own looking for it, I can't say I've ever seen this text recommended or actually quoted. My entire experience in a few varied leninist circles, anyone's understanding of these concepts only went as far as what Lenin goes over in What Is To Be Done?. It's a shame!
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