Sonja Lokar is a Slovenian feminist, sociologist and politician who has over fifty years of extremely active political and feminist work behind her. She graduated in French language and sociology at the University of Ljubljana, and as a sociologist specialised in the development of political parties, state social protection issues and gender issues. She became a member of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia in 1966. In the early 1970s, she worked as a documentarian at the Institute for Ethnic Studies, was an activist of socialist youth and an analyst at the Marxist centre of the League of Communists of Slovenia, and then a member of the multi-party State Assembly (1990-1992). As a member of the working presidency of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, she participated in the tumultuous extraordinary congress of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia held in Belgrade in January 1990, when the Slovenian delegation, followed by the Croatians, left and thus interrupted the congress that never continued afterwards. She remained a member of the transformed communist party into the Social Democratic Party, intensively dealing with the position of women in politics and society. She is one of the organisers of the independent women’s peace movement that tried to prevent the outbreak of war in Yugoslavia. At her initiative, Women’s Lobby Slovenia (ŽLS) was established in Slovenia in 2007, and in 2012 she was the president of the European Women’s Lobby (EWL).
On the eve of her trip to Belgrade to mark eight decades of the Anti-Fascist Women’s Front of Serbia, but also on the occasion of half a century of her immeasurably important work, we talked about the history and present of women’s organising in our region, and about some issues we face today in the women’s struggle.
It is important that we still talk about the history of our women’s organising today. Is the women’s movement as we have it today still leaning on the AFŽ and the work of women in socialist Yugoslavia?
We need to change the focus - to focus on public health, public education, the end of precarious work, the green shift in the economy and of course to work for peace. If the women’s movement today does not have a position on this, it is not relevant.
The Anti-Fascist Women’s Front (AFŽ) as an organisation formed in the Second World War enabled women at that time to have their say in an organised way and for that voice to be heard. They needed women so badly that they could promise them everything they needed. That organisation is the foundation of everything that emerged in socialism. But it wasn’t so simple or quick. The AFŽ was disbanded in 1954 mainly because Vida Tomšič, who was leading the organisation at the time, judged that women had become too closed off in their organisation and therefore could not achieve anything that was really important, while at the same time high politics was doing its own thing and there were no women there. The plan was, if that organisation was disbanded, for women to join the main stream of politics, to be equal in it and in that way to achieve for women and for society what they thought was important to achieve. It turned out that that assumption was not good, because closing off in one’s own bubble was not good, but having no organisation in which women form their voice was also not good.
Then it took about 15 years after the dissolution of the AFŽ to initiate everything that was not possible before. In that period of the sixties, seventies, eighties, almost all the great things that Yugoslavia did for the equality of women were achieved. In my opinion, the problem in 1954 was not only that women had closed themselves off in their bubble, but that the women’s organisation had remained very consistent with its ideas and plans since the establishment of the AFŽ, but the Party was not in such a hurry - they did not think these were priorities.
That women’s organisation annoyed the predominantly male leadership because it demanded more than they were capable of or ready to do at that moment. But interestingly, when that women’s movement matured in the seventies - what did it rely on? On self-management, on social ownership, on the delegate system, on non-alignment and on agreed quotas. We did not have legally prescribed quotas in Yugoslavia, but there was a so-called social staffing agreement that all delegations had to be at least 30 percent women. And this was respected to some extent in both delegations and workers’ councils - but it was not respected in the executive bodies that had the most power. So in executive councils, or what we would call the government today, there was a maximum of 12 percent women. And in the large companies that ruled in the economic field - there were no women in the leadership. Women in Yugoslavia had some power to solve specific issues, but they could not influence how the overall politics in the country would unfold. Still, they were strong enough to make the foundation for the equality of women in society. They did that and I take my hat off to them.
Reproductive rights are absolutely important for women, but if that and violence become the only points around which we fight in the women’s movement, we have lost the war.
In the early 1990s, so-called democracy “arrived” in Yugoslavia and its successor states. What did that bring and take away from the women’s movement?
When we were creating that democracy, we no longer had the AFŽ, we did not have a large mass umbrella independent women’s organisation that could in any way interfere with the processes that led to war. And even worse, we did not have an organisation that could influence parties not to be formed in a way that would actually be misogynistic. And suddenly we had a multi-party system, and in that great democracy - there were no women. For example, in Slovenia, from 26 percent in 1986, we fell to 11 percent of women, and elsewhere in ex Yugoslavia from 20 to 2, 3, 5 percent in parliaments and to governments with one or two female ministers. At the moment when decisions about war was being made, we were nowhere to be found. We had no political voice, nobody asked us anything.
In the nineties, from the breakup at the congress to the outbreak of war in ex Yugoslavia, well-informed intelligent women in politics and civil society started a new women’s peace movement. We saw that war was approaching and we tried in every way to convince people to stand up against war. We succeeded then in getting people out on the streets and to declare themselves against war. The most massive movement was in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but we could not prevent anything because the decision on war was not made on the street, it was made in the government cabinet. That happened without us and against us.
I still think that representation and political power of women is a key issue. My starting point is that after everything that has happened to us, it must never happen again that they push us into war without asking us anything. So we need to be there and prevent it where it can be prevented. Two conditions are necessary for that: the first is that women must be massively involved in politics, because half decide, not a third or 20 percent. The second condition is that women who understand that politics as it is today is not good must enter politics, in order that politics itself is totally transformed, because it is in our interest and in the interest of the whole society. Because if politics serves only the powerful, capital, lobbies of power and money, nothing is left for the people, and for women less than nothing.
After the war, you worked a lot on quotas, on the fight for political representation of women. How do you view that today, what have you achieved?
I would say that we have achieved numbers. We have managed to put some issues that cost capital nothing on the agenda. But we are still not strong enough to change important things. At this moment, the important things are peace and green transition because the planet, together with us, will fall off the rails. There is also the issue of new technologies that have totally changed the world - the way we work, the way we exchange goods between us, the way we communicate, the way politics is done. Everything has changed. These are the key issues of this time and we as women really cannot influence that yet, at least not in a way that changes how big capital wants to solve the global challenges. Those women who have entered politics more or less serve capital. They can win some crumbs: for example, that sanitary napkins cost less, that good laws regarding violence against women are accepted, though the question is, of course, whether these laws are implemented.
I think that the first thirty years after the democratic elections of post-socialism, we spent defending acquired rights, and we could not defend all of them. We lost most of our social and economic rights. We also gained some rights - it’s no small thing that now we can freely organise politically. Or that we have quotas, so now there are 40 percent of women in the Slovenian parliament, not 3, 4 or 7. But look at everything else - healthcare, education, pension, old people... Why are we women precarious workers today or working in sectors that are undervalued and underpaid? And how is it possible that we have 40 percent of women in parliaments, and yet these things cannot be changed? The female candidates who get positions are chosen by men, and they are loyal to them, not to women’s ideas. It is dangerous to position oneself against capital, against any kind of powerful figures, regardless of whether they are women or men. But it is even harder for women because we are not yet skilled enough at watching each other’s backs, learning how to fight together and how to find tactics so that macho ruling men cannot say no to us. Because there are such moments in the political process - they exist before elections, when a crisis moment comes either in the party or in society. That is the moment when changes can be made. But women must be ready and must know what they want.
The ban on abortion or conscientious objection by most doctors is actually an excellent business for those who perform abortions privately.
When you look at how women were organised in the war, and how they were organised after the war and how we are organised today, you see that they are very different constellations. The ways of organising had to adapt to different conditions and contexts. And what are our conditions today? We do not have large factories where the working class would be in a position to organise massively. The consumer society in which we have been living for quite some time has changed us - we are no longer citizens, now we are consumers — if we have money. We need to learn again to be citizens and to get involved wherever you think you can be useful. I don’t think all women should join parties. It is important that, when women decide that a problem in society needs to be solved, they need to make a targeted coalition that can solve that problem and then work on it. And that’s how we already work - we worked like that on quotas, on the issue of violence, etc.
One of the struggles we are waging in Croatia is the issue of the right to abortion. In Slovenia, you managed to preserve the article from the previous Constitution that guarantees free choice about giving birth, and we have an initiative to return that article to the Constitution. In that context, can you comment on the regression of women’s rights in our societies since we’ve been in the EU?
Nothing can be done without struggle. In that struggle that you have been waging for a very long time, there is still not a large enough mass that would exert pressure. In Slovenia, we fought from the first day when they wanted to remove that article from the constitution. The HDZ [Croatian Democratic Union] removed it from yours, when they were most powerful, and nobody noticed because there was a war. But in our case, when we were making a new constitution and when they tried to remove that part from it, such a scream arose in society that they did not dare to do it. When you have a constitutional guarantee, it is easier to defend both the law and everything else. The constitution states that a person is free to decide whether and when they want to have children, and that the state is obliged to do everything necessary for a person to be able to realise that.
The ban on abortion or conscientious objection by most doctors is actually an excellent business for those who perform abortions privately. And that is one of the reasons why your legal right is no longer a real right. A good, and perhaps the only way you can fix that now is what the European Coalition of Young Women did with the My Voice My Choice campaign. They launched a campaign to collect a million signatures (and collected them in six months) so that every woman in the EU would have the right to a free abortion paid from a special fund at the EU level. But that is still not the best solution. For a poor woman, it is cheaper to pierce her uterus with a needle than to travel to another country where she again has to pay for both the trip and the stay.
The consumer society in which we have been living for quite some time has changed us - we are no longer citizens, now we are consumers —if we have money.
If you make an analysis, compare women’s rights in the former socialist Yugoslavia and in the EU, you can see that we were ten times better off than them. We had other problems, for example, women’s political rights in the EU were greater than in our system, but social and economic rights were greater with us than they ever were in the EU, and to this day those rights are still not where we were 30 years ago. We are actually going backwards, and supposedly we live in a democratic society. Reproductive rights are absolutely important for women, but if that and violence become the only points around which we fight in the women’s movement, we have lost the war. And we can no longer do it like that, because today’s economic and social issues that are on the agenda affect us so much that we need to change the focus - to focus on public health, public education, the end of precarious work, the green shift in the economy and of course to work for peace. If the women’s movement today does not have a position on this, it is not relevant.
You were president of the European Women’s Lobby in 2012, and that’s roughly when the controversies over prostitution policies in Europe began. What would you say about that and how do things stand today in that regard?
When you make a mix between neoliberalism and the left, it becomes possible for prostitution to become work like any other. That is the biggest problem. When I was president of the EWL in 2012, I managed to avoid voting on it because the European lobby was divided into two parts - some advocated legalisation, and others for the abolition of prostitution. We could not agree on this in any way, and since we are an organisation that functions on consensus, we simply agreed that we would not deal with what we argue about. We would keep it in debate, but we would work on what we agree on.
That lasted until 2022. But in 2022, when I was not at the session, the general assembly still voted on this issue and decided to put the European lobby on the position of abolition. The essence of that position is that prostitution is not any kind of work and not the oldest female profession, but that it is the oldest way of violently humiliating, exploiting and oppressing women and that everything should be done not to blame the prostitute for the situation she has found herself in, but to punish the client because that reduces demand, and to severely punish all those who live off the person in prostitution. In doing so, of course, to create a state programme that helps the person in prostitution to get out of it when she decides for herself.
Why are we precarious workers today or work in sectors that are undervalued and underpaid? And how is it possible that we have 40 percent of women in parliaments, and that cannot be changed?
On the other side are liberal leftists who say - prostitution has existed and will exist, and since we cannot prevent it, and we know that it is something that is very dangerous for women and is associated with unfair stigma, if we want that danger and stigma to be reduced, then we must regulate it. What she does is not punishable, it is her personal choice and she needs all the rights, like all other workers, and those who organise her work are managers who just help her so that someone does not do even greater harm to her. When the left talks like that, they think they are actually protecting the woman. But that way of thinking is a service to the oppressors in the prostitution industry.
Besides the arms and drug trade, the exploitation of prostitution is the third most profitable international business that turns over huge sums of money, and of course those who organise prostitution sit on it. Liberal capitalism also says, why shouldn’t they pay taxes like any other worker, not realising that they have thereby placed the state in the position of a pimp.
We all agree that prostitution is terribly dangerous, that women suffer in it and that the stigma should not be on them. We all agree that the state must help those who want to get out of that situation. We disagree on everything else.
The benevolent side of human rights organisations on the position of legalisation of prostitution is that women in prostitution should be helped, that they should be protected by labour laws. But there is also an enormous lobbying power of those who have money, to pay for the promotion of their idea that prostitution should become a legal lucrative business. I don’t want to go into what whose intention is and what the goal is, that is not even necessary in the end, because I think it is enough if we clearly set the values according to which we decide on that issue. Show me one man who loves his daughter, sister, girlfriend, wife, mother, who would want her to “work” as a prostitute. I was horrified when I saw that in England a university published a manual in which it advises female students how to engage in prostitution more safely in order to be able to pay their tuition.
I still think that the representation of women in government bodies is a key issue. However, the female candidates who get positions are chosen by men, and they are loyal to them, not to women’s ideas.
There is an informal abolitionist coalition called Brussels Call coordinated by the EWL, where information is exchanged and advocacy is arranged. Lately in the UN we have Reem Alsalem, an exceptionally good special rapporteur on violence against women, who insists that prostitution is globally considered systemic violence, exploitation and abuse of women and girls and that there is no type of work where the work takes place inside the worker’s body. Capitalism functions like that - it turns everything around it into a commodity, so it has also turned the female body into a commodity. A worker sells her labour power, and a woman in prostitution sells her body, becomes a sexual slave in pieces. Something like that cannot be acceptable in the 21st century.
Sonja Lokar interviewed for H-Alter.org (Croatia) by Sanja Kovačević
P.S.
https://h-alter.org/poslodavci/opasan-put-uz-dlaku-kapitala/
Translated for ESSF by Adam Novak
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