By Dan
On the third of November, 2025, our comrade Isaac Wattenberg passed away. He was twenty-five years old. Never dogmatic, always open; Capital, an anthology of Warhammer 40 000 novels, and an immaculate, gilded collection of the Talmud, all sat alongside each other on his bookshelves. His comrades who remember him think not just of his commitment to socialism, but also of his sense of humour, his friendliness, and his deep integrity.
Isaac was born in the United States and spent his early years there, before moving to Australia when he was nine. It was in high school that he met Siena, who became his life partner. Upon graduating, he abandoned a tentative plan to study at the Melbourne rabbinical yeshiva, and instead moved to his native Florida.
There he began a business degree, before realising exactly how much he despised it, finding himself unable to tolerate it even as a simple way of paying the bills. All of this dissatisfaction fed into his growing interest, shared with Siena, in socialism.
He ultimately decided to drop out of business school and move back to Australia. Like many young people interested in social change, he began a degree in social work. And like many of those young people, he was forced to reckon with the contradictions of the profession that were plain to see.
How does someone working to help psychiatric patients deal with involuntary mental health orders? Why do social workers learn so much about First Nations justice, only for so many of them to find themselves in a role that involves removing Indigenous kids from their families? How should social workers navigate the involvement of the police in their casework?
And, most immediately—why are social work students made to work for nearly nine months unpaid, just to finish their degree? What does it say about the social care industry, that it is so dependent on the unpaid labour of students? Why is it that establishment social work bodies like the Australian Association of Social Workers are seemingly hostile to students getting paid for their work?
Getting through your mandatory work placements is a nightmare, if you aren’t lucky enough to be supported by your parents or a partner. Many students are forced to work a second job in between the eight hours a day, five days a week commitment of placement and university work. An absolutely enormous number of students just drop out, unable to do it.
This isn’t the norm just for social work students, but for many other students too—most prominently, for student teachers and nurses. It was through Isaac talking to others in the same boat that the idea of a campaign to fight for fully paid placements took shape. The result was that Isaac and a few other student activists made the decision to form Students Against Placement Poverty (SAPP).
It’s rare for student activist campaigns to grow as rapidly as SAPP did. It’s a testament to both the deeply felt nature of the problem and the skills of the organisers that it was able to gain so much momentum, so quickly. It became so important that the government was forced to try and defuse it, by implementing a limited stipend for placement students. It was nowhere near enough, however—averaging out to about $8 per hour—which is why the campaign continues.
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Isaac was, for a time, a member of Black Flag Sydney. It was in this context that we worked as a collective on SAPP, one of the interventions we were most proud of. It was because of Isaac and Siena’s work that SAPP was able to grow to the extent that it has, bringing in new layers of working class students who would otherwise never have engaged with the radical left. It was and is a perfect example of how to conduct class conscious student work.
Isaac was relatively new to the organised left when he joined, but he adapted quickly and never looked back.
Together we worked on Black Flag’s statement in response to the outbreak of war in Gaza. He only wrote one complete article in his time with us—an analysis of the exploitation of students—but it was clear there were many more in him to come, about social work, about placements, about Jewishness, about all the other things that were on his mind.
We wish we could say that his commitment to Black Flag was repaid to him in turn; unfortunately, he was to leave in the midst of a terribly managed crisis—something that should have never happened. The fallout hurt us all deeply and the inability of the group to properly resolve the questions involved was an important factor in Black Flag’s decline, and the final decision to wind it up.
Those of us who moved on to organise with the Anarchist Communist Federation were excited to see him attend one of our reading groups, and talk with us in the pub afterwards. We were excited to invite him to another reading group about workplace organising; we wanted to learn from him about his activities organising students, and what he learned while doing his placement at Unions NSW.
We all wanted to work together with him again. We now won’t ever get the chance.
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In 1888, Walt Whitman wrote a reminiscence of a Quaker preacher, Elias Hicks, whose talks he attended as a child. Whitman was struck, above all, by Hicks’ belief in his fellow human beings, writing:
“There is a sort of nature of persons I have compared to little rills of water, fresh, from perennial springs—(and the comparison is indeed an appropriate one)—persons not so very plenty, yet some few certainly of them running over the surface and area of humanity, all times, all lands. It is a specimen of this class I would now present. I would sum up in Elias Hicks, and make his case stand for the class, the sort, in all ages, all lands, sparse, not numerous yet enough to irrigate the soil—enough to prove the inherent moral stock and irrepressible devotional aspirations growing indigenously of themselves, always advancing, and never utterly gone under or lost.”
Isaac was perpetually modest and would have never allowed something like this to be said about him. Nor would his sense of humour have allowed something so sentimental. Yet those who knew him know exactly how wonderful he was—and what kind of absence is now left in our movement.
We doubtless all have regrets now that he is gone, but Isaac was a special person. As the grief begins to fade we’ll see more clearly how he left far more happy memories than sad ones. Regardless of “what if” and “if only”, one thing is the hard truth: Isaac’s presence was our blessing.
Isaac deserved to live in the world he believed in, the world he fought for—the world without classes, without government, without the bosses and cops and bureaucrats and everything else our species is presently saddled with. It is because of people like him that all of this can be more than just a dream. It is because of people like him that it can be a reality.
