by Peter Bohmer
This is the first part of the talk given by Peter Bohmer on Saturday, September 19, 2026 at the “United in Solidarity: Our Response to Hierarchy and Domination” conference at the University of Vienna, Austria. The second part will appear in the next online issue of Works in Progress. The speech has been modified for brevity and clarity.
I love the name of this conference, United In Radical Solidarity. Solidarity to me is an action of putting into practice the IWW slogan, “An Injury to one is an Injury to All.” Solidarity, if meaningful, is active, not just a feeling. Solidarity means the willingness to take risks as those in power will oppose and repress active solidarity. Without this willingness, solidarity is limited.
I differentiate between cases where solidarity with governments and parties is appropriate versus cases where only an anti-interventionist practice is appropriate. In the latter case, solidarity and support is with the people and progressive movements of the country challenging imperialism and defending themselves. This is necessary, as demonstrated below, when countries being attacked by imperial powers are themselves also causing affliction independently. My analysis is from the perspective of a resident of the United States although I also consider myself a global citizen. My conclusions are relevant, especially for those living in the Global North.
Global solidarity is of strategic importance for overthrowing global capitalism and creating a world where poverty, exploitation, oppression, and alienation are ended, where domination and hierarchy are overcome. Global solidarity makes it more difficult to isolate and defeat social movements. We live in a global capitalist world, obscenely unequal between and within countries. Transnational corporations cross boundaries with their goods and capital in search of maximum profits. Communities and workers are pitted against each other in a race to the bottom. A common response today by workers, political parties, and governments is ethnonationalism. It blames immigrants and other societies for a decline in living conditions. Global solidarity is an antidote to this reactionary politics. Moreover, supporting revolutionary struggles can weaken global capital by reducing its owners ability to exploit others. It raises the possibility of transformative change in the country of those acting in solidarity, who learn about inspiring challenges to domination and then act on this in their own country.
Global solidarity is a moral imperative. A foundational pillar for the left should be the equal value of all human life. This implies a particular burden of responsibility for those in the global north. Movements are more likely to remain principled and radical when strategic and moral concerns are united.
1960’s and the Vietnam War
My growing and deepening opposition to the Vietnam War was a major cause of my lifetime of activism and global solidarity. At first, I thought the U.S. aggression against Vietnam was a mistake and that a few protests, lobbying, writing letters to the editor would end the war by the U.S. — a country that I thought, for the most part, supported democracy abroad. I got more involved in student and city-wide groups organizing against the Vietnam War in 1967. I learned more about the history of U.S. interventions and that anti-communism was used by those in power to maintain support for U.S. imperialism, a new and important concept to me. I developed an ongoing systemic anti-capitalist analysis. It is one reason why I have maintained a lifetime of organizing. I went from guilt for what my country was doing to Vietnam to solidarity with Vietnam and the Vietnamese people. Guilt is sometimes a first step towards activism, but it is important to go beyond it. Similarly, in this period, I went from feeling guilty for being “white” to being in solidarity with the Black Freedom Movement in the U.S.
An effective tactic I learned while participating in an organization, Vietnam Summer in 1967, was reaching out to people and building on existing networks. We went door to door in different neighborhoods in Boston and if people were sympathetic or open to an anti-Vietnam War perspective — most weren’t at that time — we asked them to invite their neighbors, friends, family to their apartment and we would return with a slide show showing the lies of those in power and the destruction caused by the U.S. in Vietnam. We would discuss with these small groups what they could concretely do — for example, visiting their local congressperson and demanding the U.S. withdraw from Vietnam. They, not us, proposed the action.
A demonstration that particularly sticks out was the October 1967 march from Washington, D.C. to the Pentagon. Over 100,000 marched to the Pentagon; we had a permit until 5 p.m. Just before 5 o’clock, human rights leader and comedian, Dick Gregory, urged us to stay beyond 5 p.m., stating that justice and stopping the war were more important than obeying the law. About 10,000 of us stayed. It was the demonstration where protesters — mainly women — put flowers on the bayonets of the military police. I remember after the last news media camera left, around 9 p.m., the military police attacked us. I learned from this action not to trust The New York Times as objective.They claimed on their front page the following Monday that the demonstrators had turned violent and I knew that was a lie. It is important to read the mainstream news, but do it critically.
In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, there were two major anti-war coalitions. Mobe, which was led by the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, took what I call an anti-interventionist position. They called for U.S. withdrawal but they did not support the National Liberation Front (NLF) or North Vietnam. I was part of a coalition that had various names including the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice (PCPJ). We supported the total withdrawal by the U.S. from Vietnam, we supported the NLF and North Vietnam, and our opposition focused on all casualties of the war, especially Vietnamese, and not just U.S. soldiers. Also, we supported the Black Liberation Struggle and made anti-racism a central part of our program. The Mobe claimed they wanted to form the broadest movement against the war by not taking a stand on other issues besides Vietnam. We argued in joint meetings that they were ignoring the oppression of Black and other Third World people by not taking a principled stand. (At that time, the term Third World was used for people in the U.S. from non-European backgrounds, what today is usually called people of color). Another difference was direct action, going beyond peaceful, legal demonstrations. We organized and mobilized for actions that disrupted business as usual. One example was attempting to block the entrances to a lab at M.I.T. that did research for weapon development that the U.S. military used against Vietnam. Another was May Day, 1971, where 10,000 were arrested blocking the streets and government buildings in Washington, D.C.
We also organized a protest of about 500 people in May 1972. We temporarily stopped a train in Del Mar, California en route from Los Angeles to San Diego. It was carrying weapons to load ships going to South Vietnam to supply U.S. soldiers and their allies, the South Vietnamese Army. Seven of us were indicted by a grand jury for obstructing a railroad. I was convicted and would have served far more time in prison than I did but there was a lot of support for me, including a petition initiated by Noam Chomsky. This caused the judge to not sentence me back to prison when I returned to court after serving almost 90 days. The judge gave me a stiff probation instead. Organizing in support of political prisoners should be a part of our activism. It reduces the fear of imprisonment, reduces the probability of conviction and a lengthy sentence, and reduces our isolation if we are incarcerated.
Raising the Social Cost and Concrete Solidarity
The strategy that calls for direct action is “raising the social cost.” By social cost, we primarily meant the loss of legitimacy of the elites that causes them to concede, at least partially. This is because the social cost of not conceding begins to threaten their rule and raises the possibility of systemic change. The growing support for revolutionary change, particularly among young people — partly because of their abhorrence of the Vietnam War — raised the social cost of the war. This usually meant breaking the law which delegitimized the state. Of course, sometimes actions, including sabotage, alienate most of the population. In this case, they do not raise the social cost and give the state more power to repress us. Ironically, the Vietnam War became less and less popular over time, but the anti-war movement did not become more popular.
When the United States, withdrew all its troops from Vietnam on April 30, 1975, we celebrated the victory of the Vietnamese people and the revolutionary forces, and the total U.S. withdrawal. The main reason for this victory was the persistence of the Vietnamese people, the Communist Party, and their military, but we had also contributed. However, a weakness of our solidarity movement with the Vietnamese struggle was that our movement rapidly declined. For the most part, we did not continue to support Vietnamese rebuilding its infrastructure and economy after April 30, as the U.S. continued to isolate Vietnam so that it would not be a model of a thriving socialist society. The U.S. succeeded.
When we are in solidarity with liberation and revolutionary movements that win, it is necessary that concrete solidarity continues after they take power. This would increase the ability of the revolutionary government to meets the needs of its people, to develop in a socialist direction, and to defeat ongoing attempts to undermine and overthrow it.
Come back in two weeks to read part 2.
Peter Bohmer is faculty emeritus at The Evergreen State College. He began anti-war organizing in the 1960s and continues to this day, most recently focusing on U.S. interventionism in the Middle East and Latin America.