Leading SAlt Member Says Campaign Complaints "Overblown"

Luca Ittimani

Socialist Alternative (SAlt) member Wren Somerville has defended the faction’s reputation for belligerent campaigning as essential to the work of anti-capitalist activism.

In an interview with Woroni, Somerville claimed that criticism of SAlt for its style of campaigning is disingenuous and is fundamentally due to “political disagreement”.

“Some people are put off by our politics and don’t like us and are not for socialists organising in an open, active way,” he said. “What it comes down to is actually an argument against socialists.”

Somerville, who has been with the political faction for five years, claims the method is essential to finding sympathetic students and prospective members.

“If someone’s like, ‘I want to find the socialists on campus,’ they know where to look,” he said. “It would be, I think, a horrible thing if people … didn’t find socialist politics because people felt too worried about, like, doing leafleting on the street [and] trying to stop and talk.”

But the club regularly comes under fire at ANU and across the country for its campaign style. Education officer for Australia’s National Union of Students (NUS), Xavier Dupé, last year fended off questions from NUS officers over accusations that SAlt members have disrupted autonomous spaces and leafleted students while waiting in line for food.

Additionally, despite the historically left-wing nature of students, SAlt tends to be a smaller faction across most university campuses, although they have grown in size over the last few years.

In March’s ANUSA student representative council meeting (SRC 2), right-wing general representative Anton Vassallo suggested that SAlt members had harassed ANU students in their campaigning, which SAlt members strongly denied, saying the accusation was disrespectful to victims of harassment.

“If any one of our members was harassing people, we would obviously take it very seriously,” Somerville said. Other students have previously criticised SAlt as being a cult-like organisation. In a now famous essay, University of Sydney Grassroots member and former USYD SRC President Liam Donohoe accused SAlt of recruiting him with cult-like strategies.

The organisation dismisses the idea that its style of activism is viewed as invasive by the student body.

“Most people who come across us on Uni Avenue don’t find us super belligerent,” Somerville attests.

He attributed SAlt’s aggressive reputation to exaggerated accounts of negative interactions posted by irritated students on social media pages like Schmidtposting and ANU Confessions, saying that “stuff kind of gets overblown in online spaces”.

Somerville encouraged those uninterested in engaging with SAlt’s politics to end the conversation. “We’re not mind-readers [but] if people do give very clear indication that they’re not interested, like they say, “no thanks” or if they leave, then that’s that,” he said.

“We’re not trying to waste our time.”

SAlt is politically centred on revolutionary socialism and the theories of Karl Marx, with a focus on preparing and furthering revolutions when they arise.

“We don’t think that our group will, like, start the revolution,” says Somerville. “The condition of capitalism is what creates revolutions…but the thing that we think is important is having a group of people who are organised around the politics of those revolutions going as far as possible.”

But with protests on decline in Australia and no revolution in sight, SAlt focuses on finding and preparing the activists who will push for change when the moment arises.

Somerville says the organisation aims to “reach those people who feel like, ‘something’s wrong with the system, I need to do something about it right now,’ and … convince them that our political orientation is the one that they should be involved with”.

SAlt’s prioritisation of protest extends to its presence in ANUSA’s SRC, where it is sceptical of efforts to expand service delivery and instead pushes the student union to support activist causes.

SAlt-affiliated representatives at SRC 2 claimed education officer Beatrice Tucker was providing insufficient support for the NUS-pioneered National Day of Action climate protest, which Tucker denied.

Somerville has called for ANUSA to leave service delivery to the university and put all its funding towards activism.

“I don’t think that the role of a student union should be service provision,” he said. “I think the majority of [funding] should go to campaigning and activism and fighting for students’ rights.”

He insists the union’s provision of benefits such as food, grants and subsidies “lets management off the hook”.

“It would be an embarrassment for the National University if students were all starving or dropping out because they couldn’t afford food and had to work,” Somerville said. “We should fight for university management to put some of their massive surplus into providing services for students”.

This analysis of campus service provision resembles Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemburg’s view of early 20th-century capitalist economies. Luxemburg claimed that government provision of services and income support to workers masked their exploitation by their employers and discouraged them from revolting. She believed that, without government provision, workers would be forced to work excessive hours to survive amid worsening living conditions.

Luxemburg further called for governments to stop providing support for workers, believing that worsening conditions would drive workers to protest against the elites and establish a new world of prosperity. SAlt claim they do not advocate for ANUSA to stop providing services, and instead merely advocate against student-funded bodies, such as the union, being responsible for providing this support, however they routinely criticise ANUSA in meetings for providing such services.

Most SRC members are committed to providing services for ANU students, so SAlt’s ANU revolution appears to be deferred indefinitely, awaiting popular support.

But the organisation’s radical politics, which Somerville acknowledges attracts only a “small minority” of students, and its enduring image problems suggest that the necessary support base is unlikely to be forthcoming.

As a campus-politics-obsessed 21stcentury Marx would say, the dehumanising conditions of corporatised education will inevitably produce mass student protests. If this arises, SAlt will have to ask itself whether pushing protest “as far as possible” will deliver the utopian outcomes it desires, or whether its vanguard position will alienate the bourgeois undergrads who just want a night cafe.

Art by Jasmin Small