Many engaged in social and political struggles in Georgia agree that democracy must be rebuilt from the ground up. According to Giorgi Vachnadze, the recently formed Movement for Social Democracy shows that achieving radical democracy requires reclaiming language, speech, and storytelling.
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According to the dominant political lexicon in post-Soviet Georgia, democracy has already been achieved. The only thing left, they say, is to ‘protect it from foreign agents.’ This logic, often repeated by the ruling party, Georgian Dream, obscures a more subtle form of violence: the capture of language. Political dissent is entrapped through scripted slogans and binary oppositions, operating through corrupt legal machinations as well as the manipulation of grammar. The fugitive practice of speech is where democratic resistance could begin again.
In 2024, Lotar Rasiński articulated a concept called “practical critique.” Practical critique combines Michel Foucault’s work on the confessing and truth-telling self with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of language games. According to Rasiński, philosophy must return to the streets by interrogating and repurposing everyday speech, public language, confessional subjectivity, and ethical self-practice. Rasiński emphasizes embodied and performative acts of truth-telling under conditions of danger and risk against the universalist and leisurely pretensions of abstract theory. In the context of Georgia, where laws are weaponized to silence civil society under the pretense of ‘sovereignty,’ such speech itself becomes insurrectionary.
Towards counter-institutional poetics
Formed in February 2025, the Movement for Social Democracy (MSD) exemplifies the potential of this practical critique. Not yet a party, not quite a collective, the MSD is best understood as a discursive intervention; a grammar of refusal. Instead of programmatic bullet points or banal calls to action, its manifesto begins with narrative: the confession of a generation disillusioned by liberal promises and exhausted by the binary politics of the Georgian Dream and its parliamentary opponent, the National Movement. Its language is not one of conquest but of recovery and care. During meetings held throughout Tbilisi and other regions, the MSD invokes a language that is simultaneously therapeutic and political. Members read aloud from notebooks, circulate pamphlets, and translate official documents into the dialects of working-class neighborhoods. These acts resist the semantic domination of the state and the epistemic assumptions embedded in its bureaucratic language. Practical critique becomes counter-institutional poetics.
The tactical core of practical critique lies in its repositioning of the relationship between private experience and public expression. For Foucault, confession is not about revealing secrets. Rather, it is a technology of subjectivity, or subject formation. It is a way of shaping the self within systems of power. For Wittgenstein, every human utterance belongs to a form of life, which is an activity shaped by shared rules, customs, and gestures. In this sense, when the state seeks to ‘privatize’ dissent by labeling it ‘foreign,’ it does more than censor speech. It reorders the rules of speech itself – words and things – as in “Les Mots et les Choses” (1966). In response, the MSD organizes what might be called counter-confessions, or parresia: parrhesia, or courageous speech. The MSD’s assemblies are not held in parliamentary halls, but rather in apartments, courtyards, and neighborhood bookshops. These spaces exemplify moments of collective narration. The personal becomes political not through moral declarations, but through shared speech and mutual self-care. A striking feature is the recurrence of uncertainty.
A form of parrhesia
The implications of the MSD’s practices should not be underestimated. Their gatherings, publications, street marches, and speeches unfold within a highly surveilled and volatile environment. In Georgia, public dissent, particularly when it criticizes the state or expresses solidarity with marginalized groups, is met with harassment, defamation, and legal threats. In this context, the MSD’s commitment to free expression, assembly, naming, and storytelling is a form of parrhesia: truth-telling that carries social and political risk. By rejecting the state’s coercive narrative, the MSD embraces an ethics of exposure, rendering their work courageous and dangerous. Civil society is not vanishing; it is being renamed. When protesters are called traitors, NGOs are equated with espionage, and the language of care is recoded as subversion, the question is not whether democracy is threatened but what kind of speech it permits. The MSD’s belief is that democracy must be rebuilt from the ground up, not through empty slogans, but through new forms of communication.
Their method is slow and often evades the visible field. It resembles Wittgenstein’s image of philosophy as therapy. Instead of providing simple answers and straightforward solutions, we attempt to clarify how and to whom we speak. This is why the MSD gatherings often begin with tentative, reflective, practice-oriented questions and extensive discussions. Even within the domestic environment of the MSD, topics are highly contested and open to reformulation. They are often quite difficult to bring to a final, decisive form. Many solutions remain open-ended due to the attempt to move beyond rhetorical gestures and rebuild political grammar from lived experience.
Dissonant forms of togetherness
As Rasiński reminds us, language is always public. Even our most intimate thoughts are shaped by inherited forms. If the Georgian Dream’s strategy is to narrow the field of public speech and foreclose opportunities for self-expression, then the most urgent counterstrategy is to expand the field. This can be done with megaphones, diaries, dialogues, and dissonant forms of togetherness. The MSD teaches that resistance in Georgia today does not begin with power. It begins with speech: fragile, local, and often trembling, yet speech nonetheless.
Therefore, to reclaim grammar is not to correct syntax; sometimes it is quite the opposite. It is to invent words and practices, and to reimagine the conditions of mutual intelligibility under duress. The MSD’s journey from a symbolic launch to real-world action started with a prominent public founding event in Tbilisi. There, its members presented a manifesto grounded in justice, equality, and democratic renewal. This symbolic gesture was quickly followed by tangible steps, such as recruiting over a hundred members from diverse activist and professional backgrounds; embedding themselves in Georgia’s pro-European protest wave; and amplifying labor rights and social justice demands within the broader democratic struggle.
As the group expanded, it moved toward institutional legitimacy by attempting formal registration. Naturally, the effort was initially blocked by state authorities, further highlighting the political risks the group faces. Despite this resistance, the movement continues to develop a comprehensive political program, build alliances with trade unions, and organize locally, marking a deliberate shift from a declarative presence to active participation in shaping Georgia’s civic and political future.