Liam Sutton

Liam Sutton

Born: 12 June 1979, Waukegan, Illinois

Affiliation(s): The United States Army (renounced), the Blue Movement (renounced), the AFL-CIO, the Fifth International, the American Worker’s Army, the Eastern American Worker’s Army

Liam Sutton, supreme commander of the Eastern American Worker’s Army and Chairman of the American Labor Congress, was born into a working-class family in northeastern Illinois on the twelfth of June, 1979. His father was a mechanic, his mother a waitress, neither had attended college, and both were the children of Irish immigrants. He graduated from high school in May of 1997 and, being unable to afford college, went to work in his father’s shop. When the September 11th attacks occurred, he enlisted in the Army and was shipped off to Saudi Arabia later that year.

Sutton’s time in the military irreversibly changed him. While on tour with local militia forces near Wadi ad-Dawasir, he grew acquainted with an Arab man named Ahmad Nazari, a schoolteacher-turned militant who introduced him to the writings of Marx. Over the course of his deployment, he was gradually radicalized, first by his interactions with Nazari, and then by critically examining his own experiences in the Middle East. He was honorably discharged from the military in 2004 after losing a finger and the use of his left ear to an IED, by which point he was a dedicated communist.

Sutton’s family had lost the auto shop to foreclosure while he was away, leaving them at the mercy of the minimum wage, his mother working her old job as a waitress and his father taking a position as a custodian at a local school. Sutton moved to Chicago to work the line at a factory outside the city, and spent nearly six months sleeping in his car, showering at a local public gym, and sending most of his paycheck back to his parents to pay off their growing debts. It was during this period of time he became active as a union organizer, participating in strikes in 2005 and again in 2006, both of which failed to secure higher wages. Once he managed to secure an apartment and had enough in his bank account to stay alive between paychecks, he began taking night classes at a nearby college with the help of the GI bill. Though removed from the standard campus environment, he eventually fell into circles of younger anti-war students, some of whom were equally radical in their beliefs, and began making a name for himself in the city’s youth political scene as someone in the unusual position of being a vocally anti-war, anti-capitalist veteran.

His involvement in anti-war student organizations and union activities led him to further political activity in and around the 2008 election. He briefly drifted into the orbit of Mike Gravel’s Green Party campaign, though he never officially joined the party. In the aftermath of Cheney’s victory, his union participated in the Blue Movement, trying to elect social democrats and labor activists to local offices and Congress with the Democratic Party as a vessel, and because of the reputation he had cultivated since returning from the Army, he ended up on the Illinois Organizing Committee. Several years later, as the organization disintegrated, he found himself one of the ranking members of the movement’s national leadership, which is what eventually got him into the Fifth International. In the intervening years, he used his various positions within the organization as a platform from which to voice more radical ideas, sending young progressive Democrats down the social democrat-to-communist pipeline.

Prior to his career in the AWA, Sutton was most famous for his coining of the term “preventative weaponization,” a practice which would eventually be used by groups affiliated with the Fifth International in the years leading up to the war. The idea held that leftists organizations should engage in mass buyouts of guns and ammunition in the weeks immediately preceding planned demonstrations, for the dual purpose of decreasing the chance of right-wing attacks and creating a large communal stockpile of firepower to better arm the left. While its success in achieving the first objective is questionable (if anything, the far right simply began hoarding ammunition in greater quantities and for longer), it certainly hit the mark on the second one. The guns and ammunition bought during mass buyouts from 2013-2016 were all put to good use in the February Revolt and beyond, and the gun clubs created to give leftists basic firearm training would eventually form the backbone of the AWA.

By 2016, Liam was one of the most well-known leftists in America. He was active in the Fifth International as an unaffiliated delegate and a close confidant of Richard Trumka, whom he radicalized over the course of a long correspondence after the two met in 2013. He often drew hostility from the mainstream media with brash public statements which occasionally brought him within inches of serving jail time. He once infamously suggested that “perhaps the good men and women of Congress would have a greater sense of urgency about all this”—referring to the government shutdown of 2014-2015—“if they found themselves up against a wall.” Amidst the unrest following the fatal shooting of Jeff Bezos, Trumka asked him to begin clandestinely organizing a militia of revolutionary leftists. Months later, operating under the title of the American Worker’s Army, this militia mobilized, and the rest is history.

Sutton assumed command of the AWA as leading Liberator-General, a rank intended for up to eight individuals across the country, but, owing to the February Revolt’s relative successes and failures by region, only conveyed to two—himself and Salvador Gutierrez. Though the two cooperated for some time, by early 2018 their ideological and personal disagreements grew too great, and the AWA split in two. Today, Sutton holds nearly complete martial and political command over the Eastern AWA, which he is gradually reshaping to fit his vision of an ideal Marxist-Leninist state.