Thirty-two years ago, the political party CalSERVE, or Cal Students for Equal Representation and a Valid Education, was founded as part of the movement to divest UC funds from apartheid South Africa. This, of course, worked immediately, and every year on Freedom Day, April 27, thousands of South Africans gather and thank CalSERVE and all its brave elected officials for both saving them and inventing progressivism in one fell swoop.

Since then, CalSERVE has been a powerful bastion of leftist thought on the notoriously Republican Berkeley campus, courageously shutting down such conservative plots as Student Action’s 1999 proposal to institute a regressive tax plan and then-chancellor Berdahl’s controversial attempt to invade Iraq without clear evidence of weapons of mass destruction in 2003.

In all seriousness, CalSERVE was originally founded as a multicultural coalition meant to join together traditionally underrepresented communities. Today, we can see that history in what the party refers to as their “five core communities”: the Black community, the Asian/Pacific Islander community, the Raza community, the Pilipinx community and the queer community. CalSERVE runs at least one senate candidate from each of these communities every year, and by their own admission, the party prioritizes winning those candidates over their other candidates.

This is, in and of itself, a noble goal, and not a bad electoral strategy either. The logic of underrepresented groups — especially identity-based groups — banding together to achieve common goals makes sense; and it gives the party the strong base that has allowed it to survive for so long. Once this strategy and ethos is extended past these five communities, however, things start getting a little stickier.

In order to compete with the omnipresent behemoth that is Student Action, CalSERVE must run more than five candidates. To that end, it brands itself as the “progressive coalition” and has run additional candidates ostensibly representing progressive causes and communities — for example, candidates from the transfer community, the ECO coalition, the “progressive engineering” community (no, I’m not super clear on why exactly they’re different from all the other engineers either). And that’s where things start to break down, both in effectiveness- and ethos-wise:

First, calling themselves the “progressive coalition” is pretty disingenuous, since it implies that their perennial rival, Student Action, is therefore “conservative”. While it’s true that the rare Republican senator is always in Student Action, this is still Berkeley — the vast, VAST majority of senators from all parties are always going to be politically liberal, every year. And furthermore — it doesn’t matter anyway (gasp!!!), because this is not national politics, it’s the ASUC. The topics covered are wildly different.

Second, it’s an electoral strategy that falls apart when CalSERVE guns for a senate majority. Because CalSERVE functions as an identity-based group, it heavily prioritizes candidates who represent a very specific community. That’s why ASUC insiders talk about “the queer senator” or “the public service senator”. While this is fine and often necessary for many candidates, it limits CalSERVE in its candidate choices. Other parties can slate candidates who, rather than being primarily based in just one community, have pull across several, like Student Action candidates André Luu and Bianca Filart, or SQUELCH! candidate Anthony Carrasco. It also means that CalSERVE communities that could potentially support more than one senator, like the Raza coalition or the ECO coalition, are left with only one, who clearly does not serve their interests.

Third, because the “progressive” banner doesn’t actually indicate that their interests are all aligned, partisan politics means CalSERVE communities outside the five core communities don’t always get those interests served. For instance, this past spring, Student Action then-senator André Luu attempted to introduce a resolution creating a working group improving student accessibility to BART. CalSERVE senators promptly attempted to prevent this via bloc voting, ostensibly because Luu was running for external affairs vice president at the time and the CalSERVE upper echelons didn’t want him to have any victories on his resume.

This was obviously stupid for everybody involved, but one for whom it seems particularly self-defeating was the ECO senator, since logic dictates (to me, at least) that a senator claiming to work for the environment would support a group increasing access to public transport. But because ECO is bound to CalSERVE, the senator felt compelled to vote against his community’s interest.

(By the way that was not meant to be a particular knock on former CalSERVE senator Wes Adrianson — 95 percent of the time he was an extremely effective senator who did a lot of positive work for his community and the school as a whole, and I voted for him for executive vice president. Sorry Wes!)

So is everyone in CalSERVE a conniving, political machinator? Of course not (or, at least, not MORE so than anyone in Student Action). The core intention of the party — to act as a coalition representing minority interests — is a good and necessary one, and there have been many excellent CalSERVE elected officials (some examples from last year besides Adrianson would be former senators Kathy Tran and Alana Banks and former executive vice president Lavanya Jawaharlal). But if the party wants to remain true to its original purpose as well as act as a counterbalance to Student Action, it’s going to have to do some serious restructuring.

Jake Fineman writes the Monday column on the ASUC. Contact him at [email protected].