The Institute never allied with any left party or faction

Evidence

At no time, therefore, whether under Grunberg or under Horkheimer, was the Institut to ally itself with a specific party or faction on the left. In 1931, one of its members characterized its relationship to the working-class movement in these terms: It is a neutral institution at the university, which is accessible to everyone. Its significance lies in the fact that for the first time everything concerning the workers’ movement in the most important countries of the world is gathered, Above all, sources (congress minutes, party programs, statutes, newspapers, and periodicals) … Whoever in Western Europe wishes to write on the currents of the workers movement must come to us, for we are the only gathering point for it’ When the Institut did accept members who were politically committed, it was solely because of their nonpolitical work. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 118

Categorization

• XREF: This stance parallels the Institute’s later refusal of party-line Marxism in exile and connects to how its empirical turn separated it from orthodox Leninism.