Rather it aims at a critical understanding of capitalism as an historically particular way of organizing social life,which entails political and cultural as well as economic relations and practices,which has never been containable within the boundaries of territorial states,and which has crucial implications for processes of social self-production on scales from workplace and household to global order. Conceived by marx as a dialectical theory of relations in process,the enabling implications of marxist theory were substantially vitiated by interpretations which cast it as a form of economic determinism.seeking to recover its ability to illuminate dialectical tensions and posibilities,western marxism and critical theory formulated sharp critiques of economic determinism and posivistic forms of knowledge more generall.these currents led toward a re-emphsis of politics,culture,and ideologu within a broadly materialist understanding of social life,pointing towards an approach similar to the one cox suggests,we may understand the iraq war as the product of a confluence of social relations and processes which traverse and interrelate social forces,states,and world orders. The structures of capitalist modernity,the historical forms they assumed in the epoch of fordism and the hegemonic world order which emerged out of that context,strategic ideologies of economic security,and the culture of fordism consumerism are all implicated in this story