The failed 1918-19 German revolution left Frankfurt theorists alienated from every left faction.

Evidence

It is, however, at least arguable that Critical Theory would have been enriched if the members of the Institut had been more intimately involved in practical politics. The example of Lukacs, to be sure, suggests that there were pitfalls involved in too close an attachment to one faction or another. But on the other side of the ledger is the case of the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, whose political experience before his imprisonment by Mussolini in 1926 always served to give his theorizing a concrete quality, which the Frankfurt School’s work sometimes lacked. … After the failure of the German revolution, its members, at least those around Horkheimer, were alienated from all political factions on the left. The SPD was treated with the scorn its craven capitulation before the status quo deserved — in fact, one might argue that the SPD’s betrayal of the working class colored the Frankfurt School’s subsequent distrust of all “moderate” solutions. The KPD was equally anathema, for its transparent dependence on Moscow and its theoretical bankruptcy. And the pathetic attempts of such left-wing intellectuals as Kurt Hiller and Carl von Ossietzky to transcend the differences between the two parties, or to offer a viable alternative, were rejected for the pipe dreams they quickly proved to be. The result was that the Frankfurt School chose the purity of its theory over the affiliation that a concrete attempt to realize it would have required. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 172

Categorization

• XREF: The SPD-betrayal-colored-distrust-of-moderates claim links to Gramsci’s critique and to the later treatment of ‘the absence of active anti-anti-Semitism enabled complicity’ theme. Gramsci-as-benchmark also connects to Why the Frankfurt theorists never produced a hegemonic politics unlike Italian Marxism.
• QUESTION: How seriously should Jay’s Gramsci comparison be taken given Gramsci’s imprisonment cut him off from party life from 1926? Worth chasing whether Jay develops this contrast anywhere later.