Text page
Yet another US trade outrage
"Yet another US trade outrage" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Rather than learning from the fiasco of its steel tariffs, now shown to have cost the domestic US economy more jobs among steel users than it saved (temporarily) among producers, Bush's trade team has immediately turned its protectionist blunderbuss on the Chinese textile industry.
Definition · paragraph 2
There is something bitterly ironic about the fact that while "anti-globalization" protestors take to the streets to denounce his government, Bush's own trade policies seem to conform to an anti-globalization agenda almost indistinguishable from the one his hooligan opponents are demanding.
Definition · paragraph 2
This is only the latest sign that with protectionist attitudes gaining strength across the US political spectrum and unprincipled populism taking the driving seat, the period up to the US presidential election in November 2004 looks set to be a free-trader's nightmare.
History · paragraph 2
Yet another US trade outrage Shanghai Star. 2003-11-27 By Nick Land US President George W. Bush's administration looks set to go down in history for the most disgraceful trade record since the Great Depression.
History · paragraph 2
Yet another US trade outrage Shanghai Star. 2003-11-27 By Nick Land US President George W.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.