Protest as Conservative Phenomenon

Abstract

One usually takes it for granted that protest is a means to bring changes in the society and, in this sense, all those who protest and demand these changes are positioned as progressives. In contemporary society progressives take on different names – Marxian, post-Marxian, environmentalists, libertarians, pacifists etc. Here the issue is not to put in doubt the existence of a better future in protesters’ imagination. However, when society has not yet developed certain positions from which it may criticize itself, protest contributes to nothing else but reproducing the society in the same parameters, since it does not change anything structurally. Protest will be analyzed into three meaning dimensions: temporality, facticity, and sociality. This analysis will expose the difference between the societal structure and semantics of protest. This difference is manifested in the temporal dimension as outdated semantics, in the fact dimension as simplified semantics, and in the social dimension as monist semantics.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n8p154