All along, capitalists have sought to control labour by putting individual workers in competition with each other for the jobs on offer. To the degree that the potential labour force is gendered, racialised, ethnicised, tribalised or divided by language, political and sexual orientation and religious beliefs, so these differences emerge as fundamental to the workings of the labour market. They become tools through which capitalists manage labour supplies in tandem with privileged sectors of the workforce who use racism and sexism to minimise competition. The history of primitive accumulation itself entailed the manufacture of claims of ‘natural’, and hence biologically based, superiorities that legitimised forms of hierarchical power and class domination in the face of religious or secular claims to equal status in the eyes of God or of the state (the US and French Revolutions). Throughout its history, capital has been in no way reluctant to exploit, if not promote, such fragmentations, even as workers themselves struggle to define collective means of action that all too often stop at the boundaries of ethnic, religious, racial or gender identities.