By Ezequiel Peressini (*)
On 14 May, the Parliament passed the Foreign Agents Act, boosted by the reactionary government of the “Georgian dream”, to limit the action of NGOs and foreign media. Huge popular demonstrations during the last weeks reject this act as anti-democratic. 32 years after the Independence of Georgia, demonstrations deepen the political crisis of a country sinking between the European Union and Russia.
18 May 2024. The Georgian Parliament passed the “Foreign Agents Act” with 84 votes in favour and 30 against, after the failure of its first attempt in 2023. With this measure, the government will oblige NGOs and media outlets that receive more than 20 per cent of their funding from abroad to be included in a special register and to submit annual declarations of their finances. Its repressive and persecutory content is identical to the law in Russia, with which Putin mercilessly persecutes his opponents by violating the right to expression, and freedom of the press and represses any attempt at political organisation against his government.
Demonstrations and huge. The popular revolt is explained because the Georgian people and their youth know that this law is another step in the quest for further curtailment of democratic freedoms. Tens of thousands are mobilising and occupying the streets, in the capital Tbilisi and other cities. Vigils and night watches were held at the gates of parliament. Repression was increasing, with hundreds of people arrested and many of them being prosecuted. After the approval, the mobilisations continued and spread to the universities, where the student movement and professors carried out academic boycott actions (strikes of teachers and students) rejecting the approved law, as happened in the city of Batumi.
The coloured mirrors of the European Union
Those who mobilised en masse are not only mobilising against the government’s anti-democratic attacks and police repression. They also demand the overthrow of the ‘Russian law’ as a stumbling block that could endanger their desired – albeit misguided – accession of Georgia to the European Union (EU), which in December 2023 granted it the status of ‘candidate’, promising freedoms and better living conditions that were never guaranteed for the masses in any country of Europe. The European Parliament and the whole of imperialism travel to Georgia to claim that, with the approved law, Georgia does not enter the EU. They aim to secure better exploitation quotas and profits for their multinationals.
This misguided popular yearning that joining the EU could mean a change in their standard of living, in the face of the social crisis they are experiencing, has its origins in the political and economic process of capitalist restoration of the former Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe.
The origins of conflict and capitalist restoration
The crisis in the Caucasus has deep political roots (1). Georgia, a country of 3.7 million people, located in the Caucasus region, was colonised by the Russian tsars with violent oppression during the 19th century to impose Russification, the Russian language and the Russian Orthodox Christian Church.
The triumph of the Russian Revolution of 1917, led by Lenin and Trotsky, defeated the oppressive tsars and offered the Georgian people inclusion in the nascent Soviet Union, respecting their self-determination, language and traditions. Thanks to the liberation brought about by land reform, the distribution of the landowners’ land and the socialisation of production, Georgia joined the USSR while Finland gained its independence, but chose not to join and remain a capitalist country.
Later, the Stalinist counter-revolution put an end to these democratic and socialist gains and imposed a military and criminal subjugation in Georgia by forcibly annexing South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
With Gorbachev’s government, Stalinism applied a whole policy that ended up liquidating the achievements of the revolution. In Georgia, the governments of Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev’s former foreign minister, were the local agents of this restorationist and repressive policy.
In 1991, huge mass mobilisations triumphed, toppled the hated Stalinist regime and Georgia declared its independence. But in the absence of revolutionary leadership, the restorationist bureaucracy, which had become bourgeois rulers, continued its course and the Georgian people continued to be exploited by oligarchs and multinationals.
From the ‘Rose Revolution’ to the failure of Mikhail Saakashvili’s privatisation policies (MNU)
In 2003, they held parliamentary elections. Shevardnadze, the old former Stalinist, won again by 21.3 per cent. The elections were denounced as fraudulent (2). The outcry was not long in coming, and a massive mobilisation took place to oust the president from power, who had to flee through the back door of parliament. This process became known as the ‘Rose Revolution’ and expressed the growing discontent over the impact of the Russian economic crisis of 1998 and the worsening living conditions, corruption, and repression that stifled the working people of Georgia.
Shevardnadze organised a meeting with political leaders to avoid unrest and a power vacuum. Because of these negotiations, parliament appointed Mikhail Saakashvili of the United National Movement (UNM) as Georgia’s new president, who took office with a rose in his hand, riding the wave of popular mobilisation. They billed the UNM as a democratic replacement. But the wolf always disguises itself as a lamb.
During his mandate, state services were privatised. Public health was dismantled and state hospitals and clinics disappeared. The economy and financial transactions were liberalised. The Russian population was subjected to persecution by them. The armed forces trained in the USA and sent troops to Iraq and Iraq. Troops were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. Democratic freedoms were severely attacked.
In 2008, Mikhail Saakashvili ordered the invasion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia to regain territory and his nationalist base’s prestige. This sparked a war with Russia, which intervened and within days recaptured the territory, defeated the Georgian army and then recognised the supposed autonomy of both republics. But before withdrawing, Putin and Mandelev left behind four military bases with approximately 13,000 operational troops. This military and political failure of the MUN leaves the ruling coalition mortally wounded.
‘Georgian Dream’, totalitarian tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili and the ‘Russian Law’
Georgian Dream was founded in April 2012, as a new capitalist political coalition, with the primary aim of capitalising on the crisis of the MUN opened by the defeat in the war. It did so when it won the parliamentary elections of 2 October 2012, making Bidzina Ivanishvili the prime minister.
The coalition is led by businessman Bidzina Ivanishvili, who amasses a fortune of $6.4 billion according to Forbes magazine and is Georgia’s richest oligarch, with old associates of the deposed Eduard Shevardnadze among his ideologues and close associates. Ivanishvili was prime minister from October 2012 to November 2013 before retiring from politics to continue doing business, mostly in Russia. He returned to Georgia in December 2023 to be a new centre of power, the key advisor to his government.
His ‘anti’ US rhetoric, and his clear economic relations with the Russian oligarchy, raise concerns among his EU allies. Russia’s refusal to open a second front suggests their alignment with Ivanishvili. Ivanishvili and his party have Georgia’s accession to the EU and NATO in their political programme, as do all the parties of the bourgeois regime.
The oligarch Ivanishvili does not want to lose either business with the Russian oligarchs or business with the European multinationals and seeks to ‘put eggs in both baskets.
On the one hand, his totalitarian and pro-Russian intentions seek to negotiate better conditions for Russian investments in oil and gas. Such as business with the companies Lukoil or Petrocas Fuel Services Georgia, which had connections with Russia in the past (3). It also wants part of the communications business through Cellfie (formerly Beeline) and the mining and water businesses of IDS Borjomi and RMG.
It seeks alliances with the EU to retain business with Total Energies, owner of the BTC pipeline, connecting Azerbaijan to Turkey. It is also seeking the spoils of magnesium mining in the hands of British Stemcor’s Georgian Manganese Holding.
In a deficit-ridden country, in 2023 it was 9.3 per cent (4), oligarchs and capitalists strive to retain foreign direct investment to fuel their businesses, especially when it primarily stems from unregulated financial investments.
32 years after independence and restoration. Is EU membership a way out?
Thirty-two years have passed since Georgia’s independence and decades of capitalist restoration. Have living conditions and democratic rights been resolved? No, they are still unresolved. But the big businessmen continue to make juicy profits.
In the middle of the 21st century, the minimum wage in Georgia is only 7.5 USD (20GEL) and has not been updated since 1999. The average wage is 400 USD while the wage needed for a decent living is estimated at 650 USD. This is far below the average wage of 2,000 euros in Germany. Moreover, workers have to put up with the fact that 15.6 per cent live in poverty and that the government only offers the 650,000 socially vulnerable people a miserable subsistence allowance of 18 USD per month (5).
Would joining the EU improve this situation? The countries that joined the EU such as Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or Romania, are exploited by the multinationals of Germany or France. Their workers have the lowest wages in the EU. When joining the EU, the central capitalist powers function as a hoover of unpaid wages to the headquarters of their multinationals and spill nothing. Living conditions are worsening as the capitalist crisis grows. All EU countries have implemented strong austerity plans, provoking strong strikes and mobilisations, including the most powerful countries.
The fight is still open. Down with the Russian Law!
The undemocratic ‘Russian Law’ must be defeated or it will be used against all those who mobilise and fight for their demands. It will be used against unions fighting for wages, like the more than 3,500 mine workers in the Chiatura complex. Against those who confront plunder and environmental destruction. Against women and sexual dissidents fighting for their labour, social, and democratic rights and against sexual violence, despite being particularly hated and persecuted by Ivanishvili and the ‘golden dream’.
The International Workers’ Unity – -Fourth International (IWU-FI) salutes the mobilisation and rejects the repression of the totalitarian government. The youth, the workers in struggle, seek to make their way amid EU pressures and the reigning confusion resulting from the absence of socialist leadership, decades of Stalinism and capitalist restoration. Defeating the Russian law and repression will be the first step to defeat the ‘Georgian Dream’ government that, for many, has become a nightmare. In the heat of mobilisation, new workers and popular organisations can emerge that will allow us to advance in the fight for Georgia, a Europe, and a world without exploited and exploiters, without oppressors and oppressed to be truly free.
(*) Ezequiel Peressini, a leader of Socialist Left Argentina, section of the IWU-FI. He was a legislator of the Left and Workers’ Front-Unity (FIT-U) in the province of Cordoba from 2015 to 2019.
Citations:
1 See International Correspondence 26 “The Conflict in Caucasus” en www.uit-ci.org
2 https://elpais.com/diario/2003/11/21/internacional/1069369216_850215.html
3 https://civil.ge/archives/562161
4 https://forbes.ge/saqarthvelom-2023-tslis-sagareo-vatchroba-rekorduli-dephitsitith-daasrula/
