The first great movement of deterritorialization appears with the overcoding performed by the despotic State. But it is nothing compared to the other great movement, the one that will be brought about by the decoding of flows. The action of decoded flows is not enough, however, to cause the new break to traverse and transform the socius--not enough, that is, to induce the birth of capitalism. Decoded flows strike the despotic State with latency; they submerge the tyrant, but they also cause him to return in unexpected forms; the democratize him, oligarchize him, segmentalize him, monarchize him, and always internalize and spiritualize him, while on the horizon there is the latent Urstaat, for the loss of which there is no consolation. It is now up to the State to recode as best it can, by means of regular or exceptional operations, the product of the decoded flows. Let us take the example of Rome: the decoding of the landed flows through the privatization of property, the decoding of the monetary flows through the formation of great fortunes, the decoding of the commercial flows through the development of commodity production, the decoding of the producers through expropriation and proletarization--all the preconditions are present, everything is given, without producing a capitalism properly speaking, but rather a regime based on slavery. Or the example of feudalism: there again private property, commodity production, the monetary afflux, the extension of the market, the development of towns, and the appearance of manorial ground rent in monetary form, or the contractual hiring of labor, do not by any means produce a capitalist economy, but rather a reinforcing of feudal offices and relations, at times a return to more primitive stages of feudalism, and occasionally even the re-establishment of a kind of slavery. And it is well known that the monopolistic action favoring the guilds and the companies promotes, not the rise of capitalist production, but the insertion of the bourgeoisie into a town and State feudalism that consists in devising codes for flows that are decoded as such, and in keeping the merchants, according to Marx's formula, "in the very pores" of the old full body of the social machine. Hence capitalism does not lead to the dissolution of feudalism, but rather the contrary, and that is why so much time was required between the two. There is a great difference in this respect between the despotic age and the capitalist age. For the founders of the State come like lightning; the despotic machine is synchronic while the capitalist machine's time is diachronic. The capitalists appear in succession in a series that institutes a kind of creativity of history, a strange menagerie: the schizoid time of the new creative break.
The dissolutions are defined by a simple decoding of flows, and they are always compensated by residual forces or transformations of the State. Death is felt rising from within and desire itself becomes the death instinct, latency, but it also passes over into these flows that carry the seeds of a new life. Decoded flows--but who will give a name to this new desire? Flows of property that is sold, flows of money that circulates, flows of production and means of production making ready in the shadows, flows of workers becoming deterritorialized: the encounter of all these flows will be necessary, their conjunction, and their reaction on one another--and the contingent nature of this encounter, this conjunction, and this reaction, which occur one time--in order for capitalism to be born, and for the old system to die this time from without, at the same time as the new life begins and desire receives its name. The only universal history is the history of contingency.
(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 222-224)