Marx Brothers the Beaugard painting is stolen, so the script was contrived to include a power failure, which allowed Zeppo to play the Spaulding part in near-darkness.) In December 1917 the Marx brothers were noted in an advertisement playing in a musical comedy act "Home Again". By the 1920s, the Marx Brothers had become one of America's favorite theatrical acts, with their sharp and bizarre sense of humor. They satirized high society and human hypocrisy, and they became famous for their improvisational comedy in free-form scenarios. A famous early instance was when Harpo arranged to chase a fleeing chorus girl across the
Karl Marx and the Close of His System has been seen as one of the most important discussions of Marx's economic theories, along with Rudolf Hilferding's "Böhm-Bawerk's Criticism of Marx", a defense of Marx against Bawerk. Bawerk's work is the "classical" critique of "Capital". Most subsequent critiques of Marxist economics have repeated Bawerk's arguments. Marxist economist Ernest Mandel identifies "Karl Marx and the Close of His System" as part of a literature, beginning with German social democrat Eduard Bernstein, that criticizes the dialectical method Marx borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel as "useless", "metaphysical", or "mystifying." He faults Böhm-Bawerk and the other critics for what he regards as