Enraged, the strikers boiled into the streets of the Petrograd industrial suburb and began marching toward the center of the city and the Tsar's Winter Palace. Their footfalls were loud on the frozen pavement; their chants of "Bread! Peace!" echoed off the surrounding factory walls.

Soon they were joined by 5,000 men from the Putilov Machine Works, and by the time they reached the Neva River bridges, they numbered 300,000, at least half the marchers women.

Their courage is beyond description. Cossacks with drawn sabres and soldiers with machine guns and fixed bayonets turned them away from two of the bridges, but still the marchers persisted.

And at the third bridge -- some say because the marchers convinced the Cossacks and soldiers that to attack so many women was to attack Mother Russia herself -- the barricades gave way and the march moved into Petrograd proper, doubling then doubling at least once more in size.

Again and again, the Cossacks refused to charge; repeatedly, the soldiers refused to fire; the police fled in terror. The Tsarist authorities were paralyzed with fear; they had never imagined such things.

Thus passed the first day of the Russian Revolution...

But what is most relevant here is the thoroughly documented partnership between capitalism and all Abrahamic fundamentalism: Jewish, Christian, Muslim.

This partnership evolved from the discoveries of what used to be called "industrial psychology," which proved long ago – as early as the 1930s – the characteristic fears and sublimated frustrations of Abrahamic fundamentalists make them the most desirable employees and the most dependable consumers.

Fundamentalists regard the boss as an earthly representative of their god and regard managerial edicts as equivalent to divine word. To disobey the boss is therefore to defy god – in other words to commit the most grievous of sins.

The fundamentalists' omnipresent fear of eternal damnation thus not only compels unquestioning workplace obedience but literally murderous opposition to unions as “instruments of Satan.” (Given the longtime prevalence of Christian fundamentalism in Oklahoma, Karen Silkwood could as easily have been murdered by fundamentalist anti-unionists as by Kerr-McGee goons.)

In the de facto Christian theocracy of the South, silencing pro-union voices is one of the functions of the Ku Klux Klan, the original U.S. death squad. Not coincidentally, the Klan is colloquially known as "the Saturday Night Men's Bible-Study Class."

Elsewhere in the United States, fundamentalist vigilantes – probably part of the Central Intelligence Agency's Operation CHAOS and its war against the entire Counterculture – terrorized the rural agricultural communes of the Back-to-the-Land Movement during the 1960s and 1970s.

The rage and envy expressed by such activities is spawned by fundamentalism's all-pervasive sexual taboos, which force fundamentalists to live their entire lives in a state of sexual frustration so abnormally intense it approaches clinical psychosis.

Industrial psychology -- today I believe it is called "human resources" or some other such deceptive euphemism -- has identified this same intensity of frustration as a dependable source of both the frantic productivity and the frenzied material acquisitiveness essential to capitalist profit.

These traits of productivity and acquisitiveness are bolstered by the fundamentalist doctrine – supported by biblical examples including the Parable of the Talents and the Parable of the Fig Tree (for which Google) – that the acquisition of wealth and the ability to indulge one's self by material acquisitiveness is the ultimate proof of divine favor.

Meanwhile fundamentalism's characteristic sexual frustration is infinitely intensified by its defining hatred of and contempt for women. Based on the biblical example of Eve, Abrahamic fundamentalists damn women as "morally weak" and denounce all females as potential "vessels of evil."

Hence fundamentalism demands total suppression of female sexual expression – the hateful rationale behind the burka, the mutilation of female genitalia, the sack-like clothing forced on women in the U.S. Bible-belt, the banning of sex education, the zero-exception prohibitions against birth control and abortion now being imposed by the states.

The disregard of Nature – actually hatred of Nature – that is another defining characteristic of fundamentalism arises from the same toxic fountainhead. Not only is Nature ultimately female – a biological truth as apparent to modern science as to the ancient goddess-centered paganisms – her essential force is sexuality.

And the fundamentalists despise her accordingly.

Capitalists of course exploit all these hatreds to maximum advantage. To turn one gender against the other is to impose the ultimate barrier to solidarity. To turn humans against Nature – note the fundamentalist slogans of the early 1970s (“Environmental Means of the Devil”; “Organic Is Satanic”) – is to endorse strip-mining, clear-cutting, every other form of environmental rape imaginable.

And from the rape of Nature to the rape of an individual woman is scarcely a single conceptual step.

Which brings us to theocracy – its expansion in the Middle East (whether in Israel or the Muslim countries) and its rapidly intensifying tyranny in the United States.

Theocracy is not just governance by religion. It is the zero-tolerance imposition of fundamentalist dogmas and behavioral codes on entire populations, with public execution – typically by stoning, burning or some other form of torture – the penalty for even the slightest dissent.

The huge asset Abrahamic theocracy provides capitalism should by now be obvious. It makes religion not just an opiate but the ultimate brain-police agency. Thus – whether in the Middle East or here at home – theocracy is financed by obscenely generous funding from the One Percent.

That's why Christian theocracy has spread from its modern birthplace in the post-Civil-War South and is now metastasizing throughout the United States. That's also why – though the Republicans are theocracy's more obvious advocate – the Democrats are equally (albeit clandestinely) complicit in its imposition: another example of how each party serves only the Ruling Class.

Indeed 63 percent of the U.S. population is already fundamentalist by definition – that is, they take the Bible as the literal word of their unspeakably sadistic god (for which see http://legacy.rasmussenreports.com/2005/Bible.htm ).

And the fact we on the dogmatically secular Left remain utterly in denial about the magnitude of the threat implicit in this terrifying development is one of the reasons I am terrified we are soon to be terminally hoist by the fatal petard of our own self-righteous arrogance.

(For much more on the revolution in consciousness of which feminism is the primary wellspring, also on Abrahamic fundamentalism and its capitalist-funded counter-revolution, see “Dancer Resurrected: a Story of Love, Art, Sex and Revolution,” the featured item in my blog, Outside Agitator's Notebook, at lorenbliss.typepad.com. All of “Dancer” is relevant, but Parts 2 and 5 are especially so.)