Secondly, however, the relative limit is no more nor less than the capitalist social formation, because the latter engineers (machine) and mobilizes flows that are effectively decoded, but does so by substituting for codes a quantifying axiomatic that is even more oppressive. With the result that capitalism--in conformity with the movement by which it counteracts its own tendency--is continually drawing near the wall, while at the same time pushing the wall farther away. Schizophrenia is the absolute limit, but capitalism is the relative limit. [AO: 176]
[C]apitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of / its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit. At capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body without organs, and the decoded flows throw themselves into desiring-production. Hence it is correct to retrospectively understand all of history in the light of capitalism, provided that the rules formulated by Marx are followed exactly. [AO: 139-40]
The celebrated problem of the tendency to a falling rate of profit, that is, of surplus value in relation to total capital, can be understood only from the viewpoint of capitalism's entire field of immanence, and by taking into account the conditions under which a surplus value of code is transformed into a surplus value of flux. [AO: 228]
[I]n keeping with Balibar's remarks--this tendency to a falling rate of profit has no end, but reproduces itself while reproducing the factors that counteract it. [AO: 228]
Let us return to the dualism of money, to the two boards, the two inscriptions, the one going into the account of the wage earner, the other into the balance sheet of the enterprise. Measuring the two orders of magnitude in terms of the same analytical unit is a pure fiction, a cosmic swindle, as if one were to measure intergalatic or intra-atomic distances in metres and centimetres. There is no common measure between the value of the enterprises and that of the labour capacity of wage earners. That is why the falling tendency has no conclusion. [AO: 230]
A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output, but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the labour flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the "tendency" has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendency's only limit is internal, and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit--that is, by reconstituting it, be rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus, the continuity of the capitalist process engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of the schiz and the flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence, as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat, is continually expanding, and acquires a consistency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according to which things work well only providing they break down, crises being "the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production." [AO: 230]
And if it is true that the tendency to a falling rate of profit or to its equalization asserts itself at least partially at the centre, carrying the economy toward the most progressive and the most automated sectors, a veritable "development of underdevelopment" on the periphery ensures a rise in the rate of surplus value, in the form of an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of the centre. [AO: 231]