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A DANGEROUS FEMINIST PATH AGAINST THE GRAIN OF CAPITAL…  
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Sonja Lokar interviewed by Sanja Kovačević
May 17, 2025
Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
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_ 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. _

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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.

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Translated for ESSF by Adam Novak

* Feminism
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* Yugoslavia
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* Slovenia
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* Anti-Fascism
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* anti-war
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* women's movement
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* sex work
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* neo-liberalism
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