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]
In defining precapitalist regimes by a surplus value of code, and capitalism by a generalized decoding that converted this surplus value of code into a surplus value of flux, we were presenting things in a summary fashion, we were still acting as though the matter were settled once and for all, at the dawn of a capitalism that had lost all code value. This is not the case, however. On the one hand, codes continue to exist--even as an archaism--but they assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker, the merchant, the banker). But on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and even a science. It is these flows of code that find themselves encasted, coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies / in such a way that they never achieve any independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer). But the decoding of flows in capitalism has freed, deterritorialized, and decoded the flows of code just as it has the others--to such a degree that the automatic machine has always increasingly internalized them in its body or its structrure as a field of forces, while depending on a science and a technology, on a so-called intellectual labour distinct from the manual labour of the worker (the evolution of the technical object). In this sense, it is not machines that have created capitalism, but capitalism that creates machines, and that is constantly introducing breaks and clevages through which it revolutionizes its technical modes of production. [AO: 232-233]