Marxism, Religion and Culture

Marxism, Religion and Culture

2026 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the English translation of Maxime Rodinson’s Islam and Capitalism, a foundational text that challenged essentialist assumptions about Islamic societies and Orientalist interpretations of economic development. Following Rodinson’s groundbreaking work, a variety of Marxist and materialist scholars have examined Islamic social formations as historically situated and contested entities influenced by global capitalism, imperialism, and resistance, rather than as timeless essences or theological abstractions.

This stream invites papers that revisit, revise, or challenge the legacies of Rodinson’s work in light of the current situation of war, disaster, authoritarianism, and capitalist crisis. We encourage submissions that consider all religious experiences. We aim to explore how religious traditions, discourses, and institutions are intertwined with contemporary forms of accumulation, dispossession, and political control. Additionally, we will explore how these traditions, discourses, and institutions may paradoxically or potentially serve as grounds for popular mobilization, ethical critique, and anti-capitalist struggle.

Instead of treating religion as an autonomous cultural domain or a fixed ideological system, we seek analyses that address its historical material manifestations. These manifestations include the commodification of piety, the emergence of pious finance, and the role of religious institutions in providing welfare, redeveloping urban areas, and providing humanitarian relief in zones of war and disaster. We welcome investigations into how state apparatuses, non-state actors, and neoliberal regimes appropriate religious ethics, legal imaginaries, and ritual practices, while also leaving space for bottom-up appropriations that contest imperial violence, economic exploitation, and patriarchal domination.

This stream also invites reflection on the theoretical challenges and political potential of the intersection of Marxism and religion. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches from fields such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history, theology, and philosophy.

In a world increasingly shaped by disaster capitalism and imperial violence, this stream asks: How might a renewed Marxist inquiry into religion contribute to the critique of capital and the imagination of collective emancipation?