Emergent Conversation 28
This essay is part of the series “Solidarity for Anthropologists”
PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 28
By Whitney Russell
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn
but without our brain and muscle,
not a single wheel can turn.
-Solidarity Forever-
The first anthropologist to think about solidarity was probably León Cadogan, but not in the way you might imagine.
People across the world have long practiced something we would call solidarity, but the term itself has its roots in the work of late eighteenth-century pre-Marxist philosophers. The term is considered to originate from Hippolyte Renaud’s (1845) book, Solidarité, which summarized the work of Charles Fourier. Retroactively described as utopian socialists, these theorists were highly skeptical of markets, and advocated for alternative systems based on mutuality. Émile Durkheim (1893) later picked up some of these utopian socialist ideas in his dissertation, in which he differentiated between “mechanical solidarity”—cooperation rooted in personal relationships—and “organic solidarity”—a functionalist view of cohesion based in shared need among strangers.
The solidarity introduced by those who would become utopian socialists was more akin to a question of solid-ness than any kind of call to political action. Solidarity made a community into a cohesive whole that could model an entirely alternative way of living. It had nothing to do with alliances across differences. In fact, it was opposed to them; utopian socialists were, almost across the board, deeply committed white supremacists. Renaud, for instance, believed in evolution because he thought humans were evolving to their highest—meaning whitest—form, and Fourier was adamantly antisemitic. For them, solidarity was about white people working together to develop a cohesive, cooperative, and functional society which was, of course, going to be a white society. A large number of white people found this notion of a white socialist utopia irresistible, so much so that they would upend their lives, form groups, leave their homes, and begin experiments in communal living.
León Cadogan was born on one such utopian commune in Paraguay in 1899. His parents—labor activists and consistent racists, Rose Summerfield and John Cadogan—had left Australia to join William Lane’s “New Australia” experiment in an area southeast of Asunción. The community never cohered into the white solidarity Lane had envisioned, and the group split within a year. The Cadogan family left the New Australia commune but stayed in Paraguay. They settled into the town of Yataity where, according to biographer Anne Whitehead (1997), Rose struggled to keep the family together and John descended into a drunken despair.
León Cadogan, however, grew up to become an expert on the local Guaraní community, as well as a fierce advocate. He is best known for his 1959 text Ayvu Rapyta: Textos míticos de los Mbya-Guaraní, which outlines the Mbya origin stories. What he thought of “solidarity” is unclear, but without a doubt he was a node through which the meaning of solidarity shifted from a coherent system of white supremacy towards a conceptualization more attuned to an alignment across difference. Andrea Ferrari (2020), a poet who translated Aybu Rapyta, writes that “Cadogan’s approach to it—now that I know his words closely, in that intimate relationship established during a translation—is deeply respectful. I value his evident care in reproducing the text responsibly, as I believe he was fully aware of its immense value.” One has to wonder how Cadogan reconciled his white supremacist upbringing with his relationships with Mbya people, but that story has gone unrecorded.
Meanwhile, in Europe, Karl Marx was perpetually unimpressed with eighteenth-century European socialist philosophers. He saw them as idealists with no scientific basis for their projects, and thus the term “utopian socialist” became a kind of insult; Marx believed these utopians had no notion of how socialism would come about, and he was unconvinced that merely glimpsing a place like New Australia would lead people to cast off the chains of capitalism.
By the time the German Social Democratic Party adopted the Erfurt program—the first such political party in Europe to explicitly adopt Marxism as its platform—Marxists were using the term solidarity in a way that had nothing to do with utopianism. Rather than a solid-ness that coheres people into a functional whole, it was about a shared position in relation to capital, as well as a mutual interest in overhauling that position. For example, Karl Kautsky (1892) wrote in Class Struggle that
There comes a time in the history of every section of the proletariat when the elevating tendencies gain the upper hand. And when they have once wakened full class-consciousness in any group of workers, the consciousness of solidarity with all the members of the working-class, the consciousness of the strength that is born of union; as soon as any group has recognized that it is essential to society and that it dare hope for better things in the future—then it is well nigh impossible to shove that group back into the degenerate mass of beings whose opposition to the system under which they suffer takes no other form than that of unreasoned hate.
Solidarity, in a Marxist view, was not about the commune but rather all the members of the working class. It took on a political meaning, one that meant working across differences within the working class. It is not about how a group coheres, as it was for utopian socialists, but rather how that group becomes coherent through the realization of class-consciousness. In other words, though different, the working class shares the similarity of being working class, which becomes the basis of the solidarity. Solidarity with all the members of the working class is a political position rooted not in idealism, but a practical agenda for how to bring about a better world.
This is the kind of solidarity I would like anthropologists to reconsider. The title of this essay, “Is the Anthropologist a Worker?” asks if we are “members of the working class” and, if so, what does solidarity look like for us? While there are obviously multiple ways to define solidarity, the one I am interested in here refers to a shared understanding of capitalist exploitation, and a willingness to take risks for one another as we work towards overthrowing that system. Such an agenda only makes sense if we answer the question “Yes.”
Is the Anthropologist a Worker?
Academics have a long history of disagreeing on whether we are white-collar professionals or workers. The “professionals” argument tends to hinge on feeling distanced from, or only partially accountable to, a boss. Those most likely to hold this view are usually associate or full professors at elite research universities in states with weaker union protections, but the idea that we are not “workers,” or not workers exactly, is widely held throughout academia. Gary Rhoades (1998) has described us as managed professionals who have significant autonomy and control over our work, even though we answer to some kind of management. Ryan Cecil Jobson (2020) refers to the “guild of anthropology” and describes our discipline as an “elite professional fraternity” (260). Perhaps there is something unique about our profession, but unique-ness does not stop us from being workers.
If there is an elite professional fraternity, I am not in it, and neither are most anthropologists. I am a worker. I am a worker because the students I graduate put much more value into the economy than what I am paid. I have a boss who dictates my working conditions. I have a campus to which I report and from which I receive paychecks. I can be fired. Because I’m one of the lucky ones, I will go up for tenure this year but it does not protect me from losing my job. For instance, several tenured faculty were fired by the California State University last year for “financial exigency” that empirically does not exist (CFA 2024), and another group has been fired for speaking out for Palestine (MESA 2025). I do not have a vocation. I am not part of a guild. I am a worker with a job, and I am dependent on an institution for my salary, healthcare, and general ability to thrive.
One of the better counterarguments to thinking of ourselves as workers is to point out either our compensation, high levels of control over our day to day work, or a combination of the two. While an elite fraternity may be well compensated, newly minted PhDs cannot expect a large paycheck. Studies show that faculty salaries are declining in relation to purchasing power (O’Leary and Piper 2025) and will continue in this direction (Lu 2025). Half of us are adjunct lecturers, and almost a third of those adjunct lecturers live below the poverty line (AAUP 2019; BNF 2015). Members of this “army of temps” (AFT 2020) are more likely to identify as workers than “managed professionals” because teaching is unlikely to feel like an elite profession when one is negotiating poverty. In other words, even if our backgrounds include publications and expensive educations, the material reality for most is poverty and precarity, not elite fraternity.
While we do have an unusual amount of control over how and when we complete our work, that does not override the fact that we are fundamentally and legally tied to institutions that employ us as workers. For example, in the United Kingdom, there is a legal distinction between an “employee” and an “independent contractor.” Even though a professor’s day-to-day working life might look more like an independent contractor, we are classified as employees, which actually affords us more benefits and protections. In the United States, the IRS sees us as workers with freedom of action, a term the IRS uses to describe jobs where the worker can meet their job responsibilities as they see fit, much like an academic does, but are still “employees” for the purpose of taxation. There are benefits to being a worker. If even the IRS thinks we are workers, we may want to think about a program that claims more of the political benefits of being a worker.
Solidarity for the Anthropology Worker
What if we had “the consciousness of solidarity with all the members of the working-class” that Kautsky described? How would that change what we choose to do with our everyday workday, how we speak with students, and what we do in communities outside the university? To be clear, these questions do not equate to a simultaneous abolition of all forms of oppression. A class-based form of solidarity is not automatically all-encompassing. I do not, for example, believe that the end of capitalism will immediately end racism, sexism, or any other form of discrimination. I do not assume that it will break borders or end prisons. There is no guarantee that the post-capitalist future will be inclusive of trans or disabled people.
I do, however, agree with those who think none of this oppression can end under a capitalist system. We have reached the limit of what capitalist neoliberalism has to offer, and further liberation is impossible unless we address capital. The way to do that is to invoke a class-based solidarity not because it is more important than any other kind of oppression, but because it offers the power to withhold our labor.
Refusing to work is a uniquely effective weapon against oppression, and solidarity with workers is the way to wield it. Sociologist Vivek Chibber (2016) writes that
The working class has this power, for a simple reason—capitalists can only make their profits if workers show up to work every day, and if they refuse to play along, the profits dry up overnight. And if there is one thing that catches employers’ attention, it’s when the money stops flowing. Actions like strikes don’t just have the potential to bring particular capitalists to their knees, they can have an impact far beyond, on layer after layer of other institutions that directly or indirectly depend on them—including the government. This ability to crash the entire system, just by refusing to work, gives workers a kind of leverage that no other group in society has, except capitalists themselves… Workers are therefore not only a social group that is systematically oppressed and exploited in modern society, they are also the group best positioned to enact real change and extract concessions from the major center of power.
This kind of solidarity is not about mutual understanding or mutual aid. It is about mutual risk. No matter what legal protections we may have, it is always a risk to stand up for ourselves at work. In the absence of a social safety net, employers in the United States determine our ability to pay for shelter, access to healthcare, and more, so leveling a critique can be dangerous to the extended family of an individual worker. Solidarity suggests that I might take that risk today, tomorrow it will be you, and together it is a we who undoes our shared, though differently experienced, capitalist exploitation.
In thinking about worker solidarity, it is important to consider different levels of risk, but to also push back on claims that risk means no action can be taken. A highly respected tenured professor can speak more bluntly to a boss than an adjunct lecturer, but that does not mean the lecturer cannot speak. We never assume someone’s position in relation to capitalism, nor do we make assumptions about who can take the biggest risks in solidarity with those who cannot. For instance, that lecturer may have family wealth that can temporarily support them in the event that they are fired, while the tenured professor may be solely responsible for the finances of more than one family. Everyone can do something, and we all share some of the burden. We do so not as allies or accomplices, but as workers with a shared experience. It is not that differences do not matter, but that the same-ness of work allows us to see these fights as an interconnected struggle to free ourselves from capitalism and the oppressions it causes, produces, and encourages. Therefore, the risks we take are not for someone else but with someone else.
When we are in solidarity as workers, everything is possible. We push back against right-wing agendas for higher education (Bader 2024) and collaborate to sue the President (Tait 2025). Striking results in major improvements to peoples’ lives (Mackell 2022; AP 2022). We use labor power to protect our right to protest (Zinshteyn 2024), mitigate ICE’s attacks on our communities (Norgren 2025), divest from fossil fuels (Rutgers 2021), and bargain for the common good (Cadambi-Daniel and Nowlan 2020). All of these actions entail at least some risk to every worker. Sharing the burden is what secures our wins for ourselves and future generations. Like political scientist Tiffany Willoughby-Herard said as the police dragged her away from a protest at UC Irvine, “What job do I have if these students do not have a future?” (Sainato 2024).
The Labor Movement for Anthropologists
The end-goal is to use labor power to force concessions from capital until we, the workers, claim the means of production. One does not have to wholly embrace this specific kind of syndicalist labor organizing in order to strategically align with a class-based form of solidarity because, when it comes to our conflicts with power, refusing to work is still the surest way to win. For example, many of us are engaged in resisting ICE. What if the presence of an ICE agent on campus resulted in an immediate walkout of all campus workers? What if all the workers in a city stopped working until ICE left the area? All the workers in the state? The country? If workers were to align such that the cost of ICE was all capitalist production, it is difficult to imagine ICE existing for much longer. That is the type of concession that this form of solidarity is working towards.
Such solidarity is many years in the future, but there are concrete things we can do now to move towards that horizon. The immediate task is to organize workers as workers. While there are multiple forms of worker organization such as collectives, cooperatives, guilds, labor centers, and worker-owned enterprises, the typical way in which people begin to see themselves as workers is through unions. If anthropologists want to build worker solidarity, there are two starting points:
1) If your campus is not unionized, unionize and
2) If your campus is unionized, radicalize.
Unionize your Campus
- You can start by reaching out to a union directly. These links are for two major unions covering workers in higher education.
- However, you may want to consider an intermediate step, which is to be mentored through the early stages of unionization. The Emergency Worker Organizing Committee (EWOC) operates in this liminal space between someone considering a union drive, and a group of workers ready to enlist professional union staff (Blanc 2025). You can request free assistance from an EWOC mentor at the link below.
- It is worth noting that, since NLRB v. Yeshiva University was decided in 1980, there have been legal obstacles to unionization for tenure-line faculty at private universities (Lieberwitz 2024). However, as faculty at places like Bennington College and the California College of the Arts have shown, it is still possible to unionize, even if the strategies may be different.
Radicalize your Union
- Not every union is ready to fight. Some are business unions who manage the workers to prevent them from striking. Others are service unions that see workers as customers. A strong union uses terms like radical, militant, fighting, democratic, member-led, social justice, and rank and file unionism.
- Find your people at Labor Notes, especially in an online workshop called What to do When Your Union Breaks Your Heart. Labor Notes events are posted here:
- Get your union to join national coalitions like HELU and Organize Every Campus where you will meet people at various stages of radicalizing their unions.
- Align your collective bargaining agreement to expire on May Day 2028 so you can be part of the general strike (Lazare 2024).
- Read books like Secrets of a Successful Organizer (Bradbury et al 2016), Democracy is Power (Parker and Gruelle 2022), No Shortcuts (McAlevey 2018), and Class Struggle Unionism (Burns 2022). Better yet, read them with other workers on your campus.
- Consider developing a reform caucus if necessary. Ben Sichel from the Nova Scotia Teachers Union offers a good introduction here:
If you are in the coveted position of being an anthropology worker who is a member of a democratic and fighting union, help other workers on your campus to unionize. Or consider becoming an EWOC mentor yourself so you can take your expertise to any worker anywhere.
All of these actions, from talking to co-workers to preparing for a strike, are well-served by ethnographic skills like deep listening, observation, reflection, and acute perception. For example, “hall walking” is a standard labor organizing practice where we walk through the workplace and talk to people about their working conditions. This is more or less what many of us do in the field—find people who will talk to us about their lives. We also already know how to listen to someone in what is called an organizing conversation. We understand the limitations of a quantitative survey that lacks ethnographic detail. We have ideas about how to determine if thousands of people will really show up on a strike line. As anthropologists, we are workers with a methodological skillset that can help organize an unbreakable barrier around higher education, and we are badly needed in the fight. Wherever you are and whatever you do will be important to yourself, our fellow workers, and those in the future who will see the outcome of our efforts.
Solidarity with the Now and Future Workers
In the introduction to Guaraní Mythological Poems, León Cadogan writes that the “real authors” are the Guaraní who told him these stories and shared these poems (2024). He lists them by name, recounts that two have passed away, and writes, “Everyone else lives by writing these lines.”
He was not talking about solidarity per se, but the sentiment stands; by engaging in solidarity through the shared risk of organizing as workers, we move towards a better world we may not see. We are “writing these lines” for ourselves, and for those who come after.
Whitney Russell is an Assistant Professor of Social Science at California State University. She is an anthropologist who previously studied gender, politics, and development in rural North India. More recently, she has turned her attention to nature and gendered labor in rural California where wildfire is an omnipresent threat. Whitney is a member of the California Faculty Association (CFA), and is both co-chair and co-founder of the CFA’s democratic reform caucus, the Caucus of Rank and File Education Workers (CREW). Whitney also convenes the North Central Valley Worker’s Circle that develops local labor organizers from the ground up. She lives with her partner and many pets in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
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