“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

— Karl Marx

2020 is another election year in the post-Soviet country of Georgia. The country is to elect its 10th parliament, but the enthusiasm among the working class and especially among the essential workers is almost non-existent. The pandemic proved that healthcare and the service workers really are the essential workers in the country. As the lockdown was announced it was up to nurses, doctors, janitors and retail workers to risk their lives for the citizens of Georgia, though their work had been systematically neglected and undervalued…

The reimagining of classical liberalism through the paradigm of the individual and laissez-faire as the cornerstones has set the notion of modern mainstream economics. Since the 1930s, the then considered heterodox Austrian School of Thought was contending with the dominant capitalist phase of the Keynesian and attempting to theoretically dilute the capacity of the socially oriented concept of a state. Friedrich August von Hayek was a prominent representative of the Austrian school of thought along with Carl Menger, Eugen Böhm von Bawerk, Friedrich von Wieser. Hayek along with the economist Milton Freedman to some extent could be considered as the…

1. Introduction

The post-Soviet space, particularly the Caucasus region has become a field of drastic political and economic changes in recent decades (Jones, Georgia: A Political History Since Independence., 2015). From wars to civil wars, through deindustrialisation and massive privatisation, to revolutions and the inception of a purely neoliberal political agenda, Georgia has become one of the most curious cases in the region to research since the collapse of the USSR. The political economy perspective in the country is peculiar regarding the political push to financialization. The logic behind the deregulation is the idea of attracting investments, however, the price to pay…

The 2007–2008 US mortgage crisis soon became contagious for the US financial speculatory markets that plunged the Wall Street into panic. The panic caused the plummet of the credibility of the whole American banking sector that was echoed in almost all of the global financial centres. As the crisis went the private financial institutions were constantly losing their power to liquefy the assets. Henceforth, the leading hegemonic paradigms were set to be adjusted to the solution of the crisis.

Ironically, the neoliberal deregulatory mechanisms that have always been pushed for more “free market” came under harsh scrutiny and the lobbyists…