Horkheimer and Pollock were already communists by 1924

Evidence

To cram the stuff up, I came here to Kronberg for ten days, where Max Horkheimer and his friend Pollock, both of them highly unconventional people, took me in in the friendliest possible way and drilled me in the strictest Schumann psychology. Both of them are communists, by the way, and we had long, passionate discussions about the materialist conception of history in which both sides were forced to concede on a number of points. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 180

Categorization

• SHARE: A vivid anecdote that pins down exactly when Horkheimer and Pollock were communist by conviction — before the Institute’s formal institutional turn — and shows Adorno, co-founder of the school, was aware of it.
• XREF: Dating Horkheimer’s Marxist commitment early (1924) complicates narratives that his Marxism emerged mainly through the Institute’s institutional politics. — connects to: Pollock and Horkheimer converged on Social Democratic socialism despite Bolshevik inflections. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 247; Late Horkheimer embraced anti-Communist and pro-American rhetoric — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 1726

Broader Connections

• Late Horkheimer embraced anti-Communist and pro-American rhetoric #contradicts (0.80) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 1726