Salvador Guttiriez

Salvador Gutierrez

Born: 5 September 1974, San Jose, California

Affiliation(s): The Industrial Workers of the World, the Fifth International, the American Worker’s Army, the Western American Worker’s Army

Before he was a Liberator-General in the American Worker’s Army, and before he was a revolutionary of any kind, Salvador Gutierrez was a boy from San Jose. His childhood was not a conventional one. His father was a deadbeat and his mother died in childbirth, so he spent his adolescence with his aunt and uncle. Although he was not yet explicitly an anarchist, he started down the anti-establishment path early, beginning with his family’s eviction from their home in 1988, forcing them into months of unstable housing arrangements. He went to college on a robust scholarship after a strong academic performance in high school despite working nearly full-time from the age of 14 on, and while there, he began experimenting with leftist ideas, first becoming a social democrat and then an outright socialist. Unfortunately, he lost his scholarship and was expelled as a sophomore over a minor drug charge, but rather than move back home, he moved in with Alan Wheeler, a recent graduate and minor acquaintance of his who had drifted through the same circles as Salvador during his experimentation with leftism. In the ten months they spent as roommates, Alan introduced Gutierrez to anarchist theory, converting him into a lifelong anarcho-communist.

The mid-to-late 90s were rough for Gutierrez. In early 1995, he was arrested on another drug charge, and this time it landed him in court facing a five-year prison sentence. He was found guilty and served all five years, denied parole due to a handful of physical altercations with white supremacist inmates. When he got out in 2000, Alan, who now lived in Seattle, invited him back to live with him again until he got back on his feet. He took him up on the offer and began working with the growing number of leftists in Seattle during the early days of the Gore administration. Naturally, he flung himself into the anti-war movement after the invasion of Saudi Arabia, and became involved in labor unionism around the same time, helping to organize his fellow retail workers to demand better hours and wages.

Salvador’s first big move in the labor world happened in 2003, around the time of the collapse of the Saudi government and the rise of Al-Wartha. He was one of the major Pacific Northwest-area organizers of the Strike for Peace movement, a socialist-lead strike against the wars in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that demanded a withdrawal of troops from abroad, along with a number of systemic changes, like outlawing military recruitment on college and high school campuses, dissolving the ROTC, and cutting the military budget by 25%. The strike was ultimately a failure; while radical unionists and small numbers of wildcat strikers supported it, big unions like the AFL-CIO voted against it, and their workers ended up acting as strikebreakers, ending the movement before it really got off the ground. In an interview some time after the strike, the defeated Gutierrez, angry at the liberal unions for their role in defending the establishment, coined a phrase that would become something of a rallying cry for socialists in the 2000s and early 2010s: “Before there can be a revolution by the unions, there must be a revolution among the unions.”

Following this maxim, Gutierrez became increasingly radical in his assessment of revolutionary tactics, to match the radical positions on politics he had assumed years earlier. He joined the IWW, which helped to boost the union’s profile, and then set out on a path of convincing unionized workers to abandon their moderate, trade-specific unions and join up as well, starting with the local retail union he had helped form back in his early activist days. Over the 2000s, the IWW’s membership ballooned, a trend that would later continue and even accelerate under the Cheney administration, and as it grew, so too did his renown as an organizer and aspiring revolutionary. Aside from his activities in the IWW, he was also instrumental in the formation of the Farm & Field Labor Alliance, a leftist federation of farm workers’ unions and associations of small farm owners that aimed to fight the corporatization of the agriculture industry. With his support, the Alliance grew into a real threat to liberal agricultural unions like the UFW, eventually even supplanting it as the dominant organizer of labor in that sector. The mass resignation of UFW members, causing some locals to dissolve entirely, is widely considered the “spark” which incited the AFL-CIO’s sudden leftwards slide as it scrambled to accommodate the shifting winds of public opinion. The Federation eventually moved so far left that it ejected police unions from its ranks and began electing outspoken socialists to high posts—in a sense, the “revolution among the unions” was brought to fruition.

Gutierrez represented the IWW in the Fifth International when it first convened in 2013. By this point he was, like Sutton, one of the most famous leftists in America, and increasingly famous around the world. With his guidance, the IWW had led the way in the Great Transport Strike of 2011, and his role in the foundation of the F&FLA, and subsequently in pushing the AFL-CIO from its position of liberalism to something approximating socialism, was well-acknowledged in leftist circles. So it was no great surprise when he was elected Chairman of the International in its second congress, nor was it, to those who were privy to such information, when Sutton tapped him to be one of the Liberator-Generals under his command during the formation of the AWA. In fact, it was assumed he would be Sutton’s de facto second-in-command, an assumption which, for a time, proved to be correct, if only because he was the only person left to fill such a position come March 2017.

Following the schism of the AWA, Gutierrez took sole command of the army’s western forces and began to reorganize them in a way more in tune with his anarchist ideals. The rigid chain of command was somewhat relaxed, and the army as a whole was segmented into a more locally-organized, cell-like structure. Today, he continues to command the Western AWA when such direct leadership is necessary, and perhaps more importantly, he provides moral and ideological guidance for it and like-minded leftists everywhere.