Copyright photo“Mautskebeli”(The protests in Tbilisi. April 8, 2025)
Months have passed since the article was written. In the meantime, the criminal government has jailed leaders of the Chiatura mines without a trial. The mines have been opened and “reorganized”, meaning that anyone who does not comply with their demands will get sacked. As regards to Tbilisi, the government is continuing its assault on civil rights and freedoms. Dozens of people have been imprisoned. The protests, on the other hand, only show signs of dwindling.
Introduction
The Western world, naively referred to by my compatriots as „civilized countries,” has set its sights on Georgia with characteristic sympathy, expressing „concern” over the decline of democracy and the rise of authoritarianism. In yet another iteration of what has become an Eastern European cliché, the Georgian state appears to be dismantling its own civil society while reorienting itself toward Russia and China.
Those familiar with global politics know that Georgia has become a „hotspot” in recent years, with ongoing protests in the capital, Tbilisi, against the government. The inspiring imagery of a “colorful youth” resisting a corrupt and despotic regime has shaped contemporary perceptions of Georgia—both for Europeans and Georgians themselves.
There is no reason to deny the authenticity of „the spectacle,” except for the pathetic need of some “leftists” to justify any „anti-Western” state formation. For years, “the Georgian Dream” party positioned itself as pro-Western and pro-European, reinforcing the illusion of Europe as a „distant heaven” toward which Georgia was marching. Yet, it has abruptly reversed course without coherent explanation. True to the economic policies of its predecessors, “Georgian Dream” privatized and gutted social services, weakened the state (intervening only to enrich itself and its allies), and left much of the population dependent on foreign investment—primarily through NGOs. In recent years, without offering viable employment alternatives, the party has branded NGO workers as potential foreign agents, subject to state surveillance. “Georgian Dream”, which came to power by capitalizing on the previous authoritarianism of Mikheil Saakashvili’s government (2004-2012), now openly declares its intent to use its constitutional mandate to ban opposition parties. The list of such shameless maneuvers is long and infuriating, but they all confirm that rebellion against this government is entirely justified.
Yet I still call it a „spectacle,” for it conceals as much as it reveals. It is as „fake” as it is „authentic,” offering no sign of progressive change. Above all, it obscures the most severe antagonism in Georgia: class struggle. The epicenter of this struggle now lies in western Georgia, in and around the city of Chiatura—a place that has entirely escaped the attention of European „sympathizers” and much of Georgian society. Yet it is here that Georgia’s real future is being decided, where the outcome of this singular struggle will determine our collective destiny.
Where we are and how we got here
Capitalism did not come to Georgia through a bourgeois revolution. We have no tradition of Georgian Robespierres or Garibaldis—but we do have a long history of reactionary, sycophantic nationalism. Georgia was forcibly integrated into Soviet Russia after the Red Army’s 1921 intervention. With no mass Bolshevik presence, Moscow (at this point still under revolutionary leadership) had to make cultural and class concessions to maintain power. Initially, these had progressive, even emancipatory dimensions, for Georgian language and culture were promoted and the county developed economically. Yet, Soviet Georgia also absorbed bourgeois officials and intellectuals, creating an elite of „loyalists” who paid lip service to the regime while remaining hostile to communism. The process of Bourgeois integration was further intensified by Stalinist terror, in which virtually the entire progressive and working-class intellectuals were annihilated. Among the most famous anti-communist but Soviet loyalist intellectuals was Konstantine Gamsakhurdia—a literary modernist but a political reactionary—whose son, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, became a nationalist dissident in his teens. Zviad later emerged as the face of Georgia’s „resistance” movement and its first president. In his brief tenure, he distinguished himself by indiscriminately imprisoning opponents and espousing a vulgar Georgian nationalism that denied the existence of an Abkhaz nation. However, he opposed rapid privatization and shock therapy economics, partly leading to his overthrow by a rival nationalist faction led by Jaba Ioseliani.
The Ioseliani clique was a band of neoliberal, terrorist nationalists who plundered and brutalized Georgian villages and ethnic minorities. Under their military tribunal dictatorship, modern Georgian „democracy” was born. The anti-Gamsakhurdia movement’s participants became Georgia’s new cultural, political, and—most crucially—economic elite. From the 90s onwards, Georgian society was plagued by gangs, corruption, and street violence, which the post-Ioseliani government either collaborated with or was unable to curtail. The process of “cleaning up” was started with the “Rose Revolution”, an eruption against general corruption and decay in Georgia. The revolution brought the UNM (“The United National Movement”) to power, with Mikheil Saakashvili as its president. Saakashvili was initially a popular political leader, but his reform policies had a double-sided character: on the one hand, the streets were freed from violence, but the state did so with a “no tolerance” approach, utilizing police brutality against criminal elements and general civil dissent alike. The Georgian economy was set in a concrete direction, followed by temporary growth and development. However, the economy was completely neoliberalized, subjecting all of Georgia to the whims of market interests. The man behind this policy was Kakha Bendukidze, a Russia-made oligarch and an ideologist of extreme privatization. When the “historical mandate” of the UNM was complete, and when Georgian society was fed up with its brutality and authoritarianism, they were replaced by “The Georgian Dream”. The GD was led by Bidzina Ivanishvili, yet another Russia-made oligarch, who initially postured as a progressive alternative to Saakashvili. This posturing went so far as to have GD align witg the “progressive alliance”, an international umbrella organization uniting social-democratic and democratic socialist parties. On the domestic level, however, nothing changed. Georgia stayed neoliberal, kept the same state bureaucracy, maintained its geopolitical orientation, and became an heir of the same capitalist policies that characterized the previous government. A telling example of this is that Natia Turnava, the former GD minister of the economy, was the deputy of Kakha Bendukidze – The father of Georgian neoliberalism. For a decade, the “Georgian Dream’s” main rhetorical weapon was to say “at least we are not the UNM”. That can only keep a neoliberal bureaucratic party in power for so long, as it was bound to run out of steam sooner or later. The first to realize this were the “Georgian Dream” themselves, who reoriented themselves towards cultural conservatism, soft Euroscepticism, and authoritarianism to stay in power. Sensing the changing tides in Europe, it ceased affiliating with social-democrats and found a new friend with Viktor Orbán and the broader European far-right. Such is the story up to the current date.
To reiterate, post-Soviet Georgian capitalism rests on a criminal foundation, built by a reactionary comprador bourgeoisie which has been the backbone of every subsequent government.
The true stumbling block to any democratic movement in Georgia lies in an inability to understand the practical consequences of this historical fact. A tendency towards authoritarianism, corruption, injustice and decay are not incidental occurrences that can be done away with a vote, but are structurally inbuilt in our state-formation. In countries such as ours, the existence of a functional liberal democracy is a temporary irregularity, unsustainable because of the comprador-bureaucratic nature of our capitalism. The “inability” to come to terms with this reality has its own class dimensions. As noted in the introduction, the failure of governmental structures in Georgia has made a vast segment of the middle-class dependent upon NGOs. They are the main targets, as well as the main opponents, of the government. The protests, it is true, are massive, and at certain points have gathered hundreds of thousands of people. It would be unfair to characterize the whole of the resistance as a middle-class rebellion (for lower segments also participate); However, the dominant content, the class composition, the rhetoric and the politics of the protests are, in the final instance, petit bourgeois. The opposition parties range from the “centre” to the right, all of them agree with neoliberal policies and reduce every problem of Georgia to Geopolitical orientations. The government, they say, is dragging us away from “our home”, from Europe, the continent which will bring a guarantee of freedom and prosperity to our country. But it is Europe that has gained most from the destitution of Georgia! Before the Soviet collapse, our population was close to 6 million. Currently, it is not even 4 million. The results of deindustrialization, decollectivization and the collapse of our educational institutions created an army of workers who were “taken in” by Europe as a source of cheap labour. Like a cruel master, it has dangled the bone of European integration over our heads for decades, knowing that our aspirations would guarantee loyalty to the west, without getting any of the social, political, and economic benefits of being part of a European polity. It is the existential dependence of the large parts of the middle class on the West, as well as the illusions cultivated by the propagandists of “Enlightened civilization”, which excludes reason and clear, programmatic thinking on the part of the liberal petit bourgeoisie. For this reason, the urban middle class does not – and will not – be capable of integrating the perspectives of the workers and peasants of Georgia, against whom the government and the big bourgeoisie is waging ruthless, disproportionate class warfare.
Chiatura, the sign of things to come
Chiatura is an industrial city in the western part of Georgia. The mining industry was opened up in the 19th century, when Georgia was still a Russian colony. Since its very inception, the miners of Chiatura constituted the most class conscious and radical segment of the Georgian working class, a Bolshevik stronghold in an otherwise Menshevik dominated country. In the times of modern Georgian capitalism, Chiatura mining came under the ownership of “Georgian Manganese LLC”, a subsidiary of the British steel company “Stemcor”. The majority shareholder of GM LLC is an Israeli-Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi. For years, the workers of Chiatura struggled for better wages and working conditions, resulting in wage increases that barely kept pace with inflation and left the fundamental conditions of the mining industry virtually untouched. The current stage of class conflict started in February of 2023, when the company used the excuse of financial losses to halt the employment of workers, promising them 60 percent of their wages during the layoff period. The company said they would restore normal working conditions by May. Instead, it demanded that by June miners should continue working longer hours for reduced pay, a demand that was refused. There was no long-term communication between the workers and their employer, only an SMS in which the company told the workers that it would compensate them for their unpaid wages. Not only did this not happen, but at that point the workers of the city had to depend on loans from the bank, the percentage of which inflated as time moved on. Even in the case of complete compensation, the loans would still be higher than the wages given to them.
The first strike lasted till June 24th. its demands were the same as they had been previously: better wages, safer working conditions, and environmental accountability. The last demand is key, for the mining industry is not the only source from which the company extracts magnesium. They extract materials directly from the soil in the surrounding villages, most notably Shuqruti. The village is intensely poor, and the corporation has used their poverty to force peasants out of their lands and turn the whole place into an extraction site. Having no tools of struggle, such as a proper trade-union or a party of and for the workers, the protestors of Shuqruti used every means at their disposal to attract attention from the wider Georgian society, holding a “protest” (a plea of consideration!) in front of the American embassy, sowing up their lips and eyes, and going on a hunger strike in front of the parliament building in Tbilisi. The hunger strike was contemporaneous with the famous anti-authoritarian protests. Not one representative of the opposition though it necessary, or even punctual, to speak with the strikers! Make no mistake, this was no moral failure or accident on the side of the opposition. They made no attempts to engage with the strikers because social demands run contrary to their vision of Georgia, which is only the vision of their bourgeois class interests! Hence the Georgian peasant and worker, completely abandoned by civil society, can only make use of the one and only possession they have been left with: Their own bodies, which they mutilate in hope that a society without conscious and dignity will show some interest in their suffering…
The talk about a financial crisis was empty words from the get go. In 2021 alone, the company recorded a net profit of 74 million GEL. Then what did their strategy serve? Very simply, they wanted to break the workers into accepting any and all working conditions, as well as preparing an alibi for potentially moving onto the cheaper, faster, more profitable and more destructive means of extraction in the villages. And so, they did!
In March, the mining company announced it would abandon Chiatura, claiming industrial conflict had rendered its business untenable—unable to tolerate shrinking profits wrung from exploited labor. For the city, this is a catastrophe: the company’s refusal to meet worker demands has condemned Chiatura to destitution and unemployment. Meanwhile, Georgia’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, declared it „wrong in principle” to expropriate private property, rejecting workers’ calls to nationalize the mines. These developments will have lasting historical consequences for Georgia. In recent years, we have witnessed the wholesale destruction of villages. By exploiting the dire conditions they themselves created in the countryside, The bourgeoisie and their corporations have bullied peasants into selling their land, accelerating rural desolation. The closure of Chiatura’s mines will only hasten this process. Now, the work of extracting Manganese will be primarily concentrated on direct, out-of-the-ground work in poorer regions, devastating not only the social fabric, but also the natural environment of the countryside. The process has already started, with the corporation doing extraction work directly outside of people’s houses. With most emigrants already being the poor and the unemployed, the decline of the overall population will now drastically increase. Georgia is slowly being turned into a swamp of poor middle class “copywriters”, IT “workers”, and lumpen parasites that entirely depend on their family members sending money from overseas, who work as poor laborers at construction sites and as caretakers. The Georgian middle classes and, why not say it, most of Georgians as a whole have forgotten that a whole country exists outside of the big cities, a country that is being driven to the grave while they are preoccupied with bourgeois “democracy”.
Where to?
As It stands, the proletariat of Georgia, even as powerless and politically weak as it is now, is the only class that is directly confronting the sources of authoritarianism and corruption in the country, whether consciously or not. Their fight is less romantic, their appearance less pleasing, and their fight more uncomfortable for the foreign “sympathizers” of our poor nation, but it is they who are in direct, existential conflict with bureaucratic-comprador capitalism. After the closure of the mining plant, it is uncertain what path the future holds for the proletariat of Chiatura and for their struggle. One thing is certain – it is a folly to speak of democracy and injustice without addressing the social question, the question of property, which is directly relevant to the everyday lives and well-being of most Georgians. The primary responsibility of Marxists in Georgia is to prepare as a force capable of intervention, direction, and struggle for proletarian class interests. The path is a difficult one, but the constitution of Marxism as a relevant political trend is of paramount necessity in addressing things to come. As regards to the petit bourgeoisie and the wider Georgian population fighting against authoritarianism, us Georgian communists join them and we wish them success, even with their illusions, even with their failures…
But when true justice comes to Georgia, the workers and peasants of this country will ask the democratic middle classes: where were you? Where did you stand when we bled, when we starved, when we mutilated ourselves and fought for our dignity? Where were you when we were driven from our houses, with our children in our hands? Where were you when the soil wept and people mourned?!
In the meantime, the petit-bourgeoisie better prepare a good answer!