I could see how, many years ago, the industrial revolution would have resulted in resentment and longing for the idealized certainty of feudalism. Some couldn't accept a society where the free markets allowed uneducated shopkeepers and engine mechanics to wake up millionaires, while refined aristocrats often went penniless. It seemed unfair that money ruled while quixotic passions and heroism became a joke. Poets sold the dream of a bygone era where benevolent overlords took care of loyal peasants. That poetic mirage was more appealing than the prosaic reality of money and profits, where every man was responsible for his own destiny. Eventually some sappy thinkers invented "feudalism with a human face" and called is socialism. If the USSR were one day to go back to capitalism, I thought, we could expect a similar longing for the certainty of the good old days.

I imagined that Marx would have been terrified by the USSR: this surely wasn't what he had intended. He would also be dismayed by all the other Marxist regimes, no matter what continent or cultural background. Perhaps, the flaw was not in the implementation, but in the ideas themselves, consistently failed in practice, it was probably not so great to begin with.

Thinking about it made me draw an eerie specter of Don Quixote, the feudal fossil that haunted the capitalist world. He lurks outside its neon-lit cities and waits for an opportunity to attack its industries that are the updated windmills. I took Picasso's famous ink sketch and redrew it as a literal representation of Don Quixote's skeletal figure in three dimensions.

To the Spanish communist Pablo Picasso, Don Quixote may have been a heroic, if comical, social justice warrior. To Miguel Cervantes, who had created this character four hundred years ago, Don Quixote was an archetypal delirious fruitcake who wanted to change the world by turning the clock back to the idealized era that had never existed.