On the one side there is an extension of the automatisms of capitalism, fulfilling on of Marx’s inspired predictions: the world finally configured, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization. [..] On the other side there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation [..]
The semblance of a non-equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge – taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so-called cultural singularities – of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs. And these infinite combination of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth. Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialised magazines, improved shopping malls, ‘free’ radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady ‘public debates’ at peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a constant creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenise its space of action; identities, moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole.
from St Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.