The Indispensable Enemy: Labor and the Anti-Chinese Movement in California is a 1975 labor and California history book by Alexander Saxton which became one of the founding texts of Asian American studies. The book has been described as "represent[ing] the best example of writing in the historical materialist tradition within Asian American Studies"[1] and "[t]he model of historical writing" that discusses both the "history of workers and racism", both interracial "unity but also the limits of that unity."[2]