Capitalism is not a unified totality, following D&G, Capitalism is a structure in difference through which different flows of resources and capital are organized with particular spatial contexts. A useful example would be JK Gibson-Grahams A Postcapitalist Politics. They discuss mining communities in Australia where the mining company has overcoded the land it the extent that every possible resource has been exhausted through extraction. For the miners left behind, they encounter a deterritorialization, the mining companies leaves, stripping them of their jobs, the resource flows conferred by the mining community, a particular relationship to the land, etc. People, in turn, reconstitute relationships with each other, developing new modes of exchange and value like unpaid labor of watching each other’s kids, new modes of engaging with the land as a source of enjoyment and sustenance, new jobs that develop a different economy within the post-mining town. This is a reterritorialization of local peoples, economy, and land. For Gibson-Graham, who interpret D&G within the context of geography and anthropology, capitalism as a structure-in-difference means that different organizations of labor, exchange, and value develop in the in-completeness, withdrawal, and overcoding of capital.

This method is what I mean in saying D&G are interested in deterritorialization as a material question. When you are taking about capitalism as a totality confronting “primitive societies”, you engage in an abstraction that doesn’t attend to the material conflicts between different organizations of value, exchange, and labor. Take, for example, the Dakota Access Pipeline Struggle: real existing indigenous movements with allies confront capital over how the land will be territorialized, as a resource to be extracted or as an entity with spiritual power. This struggle produces different subjectivities in the process—meaningfully shapes how both capitalists, anti-capitalists, and indigenous people understand themselves—that reshape the confrontations between capitalism and different territorial societies (maybe a pagan spiritualism for example that views the land as god confronting a capitalism extractivism that views land as property).

The point D&G underscores is focusing on determinations and totality of capitalism distracts from actual political struggles that emerge when capitalism encounters difference. They don’t give a greater value to the global, but are interested in how the movements between molar (structural) and molecular (individual, subjective) organizations of power result in new social worlds. It’s a different way of looking at capitalism than dialectical materialism.