"Are you waiting for us to die?" - this cynical question, posed to the Government of Montenegro and Prime Minister Milojko Spajić, was recently found on one of the banners with which former workers (and some workers) "Košuta" arrived in Kruševo ždžrijelo, where they have been periodically stopping traffic on the route for four months Cetinje-Podgorica in order to draw attention to themselves and pocket the salaries that have long been owed to them.
Those of us who remember longer immediately recognize this brutal, unwashed, popular political voice of deceived women workers who, since the nineties of the last century, have desperately resisted the transition gilipters who metaphorically and literally threw them out onto the street; a voice from which emerges an endemic mistrust of the elites, into which the centuries-old experience of being humiliated and insulted seems to have flowed, and a hard, desperate faith in the dignity of work, left over from the time when we sang "International" in school choirs - We are looking for what we have earned, not alms! Everything is, in fact, always similar when a real, majority woman is overheated, and she is overheated only when she has to overheat, when she is left without anything, or gets a slap in the face - there are always those similar, mostly maternal bodies, with swollen legs in slippers, growths of undyed hair, cigarettes between their teeth, scattered on the dusty pavements, which do not suit them, where they should never seek not only what they have earned, but also all the things without which life cannot be called dignified.
The final in Krush's throat
It is possible that the protest in Kruševo džrijel is the last, already overdue episode of the dreary transitional social soap opera on the subject of the humiliation of Montenegrin workers employed in socialist "women's factories". That's why the question from the banner may not be cynical at all: many former workers of those factories have in the meantime really died with the same sense of injustice that led the former workers of "Košuta" to Kruševo's throat.
Resolving the demands of the former workers of "Košuta" would perhaps put an end to the painful historical chapter about the transitional humiliation of workers in the socialist women's industry, but not to the story of the political death of "ordinary women" - that story is far from over, the moment when there will be no more reasons to ask the same question - Are you waiting for us to die?
Therefore, "ordinary" women are not only threatened by biological disappearance, which, as things stand, could easily preempt justice. The female majority, thousands of ordinary women in Montenegro are threatened by another - political death. Their needs, those concerning the material conditionality of their lives, no longer have a political framework in which they can be articulated as politically legitimate demands. The protest in Kruševo ždříle looks like a desperate, lonely gesture because these women have neither a political platform nor political allies. Left-wing political parties, which would be their natural allies, are nowhere in sight. Women's rights fighters, who are their second, or perhaps their first, natural ally, are in sight, but it's as if they are not there - their political agendas are buried by other issues, there is no place for such women's needs.
Real or symbolic female
What contemporary women's rights activists (mostly) recognize as legitimate women's issues corresponds to the logic of neoliberal capitalism and its interests in relation to women. This neoliberal feminist logic is sometimes described by left feminists as a denial of the feminine Real and the triumph of the feminine Simolic. British feminist and writer Nina Power writes about this, among others, in the book "One-Dimensional Woman" (2009): the time we live in she describes here as "the time of symbol women".
It sounds complicated, but it's actually simple to understand. The idea is the following: women are mistaken if they think that the most important thing for them is decent living conditions and social care of the state, if they cannot create them themselves - no, what they need most are symbolic interventions, changes in symbolic, signifying orders and the removal of gender cultural barriers . Once they get rid of them, there is no more winter for them.
Agreeing to this idea requires a high ability to deny reality and the absence of an elementary sense of justice. In the Montenegrin context, it would look something like this... The material conditions of ordinary women's lives do not belong to the body of women's issues and therefore do not need to interest politicians, but the political participation of women must interest ordinary women, and not because politicians will advocate for them, but because by entering politics they will "change consciousness" and symbolically "encourage" ordinary women for a similar undertaking, although it is clear as in the palm of the hand that only otherwise privileged women will most likely profit from this "change of consciousness", while for them, political and other high careers (if they are interested at all) will remain as accessible as the top of Mount Everest; as it is completely clear that the politicians are actually women who pursue their private careers, presenting themselves as representatives of "all women" who, however, no one has ever asked if it is important for them that women sit in the Parliament and other political bodies and earn money there salaries they can only dream of.
Total trade
In just a few decades, transiting from materialist and socialist to neoliberal cultural-identity feminism, we made a total turn in terms of understanding the content of the struggle for gender equality. We paid for entering the international, western-feminist and democratic political and gender-political track by rejecting the feminine Real, renouncing solidarity and denying the obvious truths about class, education, health, age and who knows what other restrictions that make many women necessarily dependent on support of the state. Here, in this train we boarded, we sometimes have to suspend our common sense - so that we could otherwise believe in such nonsense as the claims that all women have equal chances in the "market game", or that ordinary women are decent and safe salary, social care, institutional assistance for raising children or health care, actually more important is gender-correct language, cultural-identity issues and everything related to the so-called politics of recognition, the way in which women are visible in the cultural signifying order.
Women's Real had nowhere to go: it had to crawl into the political mouse hole under the onslaught of such ideas. From time to time, as it happens these days in Krushev's Throat, it tries to go outside, spills onto the hot asphalt, breaks into the feminine Symbolism and exposes all its social arrogance, untruthfulness and hypocrisy. It is good that we sometimes see it and remember it because political discourse really has the power to make something as real as the thousands of ordinary women we meet every day invisible and unreal. But in the end, this only increases political frustration - the issue of political legitimization of the female Real will be in a dead end until political allies appear, and not only those from the ranks of women's rights fighters.
(ROZA - Portal for feminist and left politics)
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