Frankfort School and Marxim

When I was a kid growing up in Des Moines I used to live down the street from a Communist book store. I don't know why this bookstore intrigued me so much, maybe because I was kind of an odd duck when I was a kid, I don't know. But I had this strange obsession with imperial Russia and social uprisings. In ninth grade all my history projects where on Russia and the Bolshevik revolution. In particular, I was especially interested in Tsar Nicholas the second, Rasputin and Lenin, and was really disappointed that I had to settle for German as my foreign language rather than Russian. The reason that I bring up this trip down memory lane is because during the readings of critical theory, socialism theory, and the Frankfort School brought back odd, but warm memories. Which really got me thinking about how all the readings really tied together, without socialist reform there wouldn't be the Frankfort School and without the Frankfort School there wouldn't be critical theory. Maybe this is too much of a slippery slope or red herring analysis, but it's how my brain sees it. One of the questions that I posed to my group was I wanted to know how they thought socialism and the Frankfort School impacted critical theory. The response I got back also took me back to those early high school years, as they looked at me like, uh? Really? But yeah, really. I found that the readings took me back to that time in my life, of understanding but not at the same time. Of feeling brimmed with questions and excitement because, I was not entirely sure about the readings.
The critical theory readings were long, and after awhile I did  feel a bit like really, enough with the invisible college, but when I turned to the Frankfort school readings and the socialism readings it all made sense. So, to answer my own question, I thought it was markedly interesting that invisible college "genealogy" was birthed if you will, by the same people that questioned the status quo of that time. Feenburg states that, "...Its here that the Marxian conception of socialism becomes more than  political alternative and points toward fundamental civilization change".

Also in the Feenburg article the correlation between Marx was heavily influenced by his invisible college "colleague", Hegel. Importantly, Marx was a fan of Hegle's critique of Kantian ethical formalism. Hegel did not like the idea that values subset in an ideal sphere cut off from factual reality, as to paraphrase Feenburg. Hegel believed that all societies realize values in the everyday which is regarded as facts by social life of their members. Marx based a lot of his socialist political reform on this very thought and is one of the very foundations of critical theory and the Frankfort school. Members of the Frankfort school agreed that: reality is socially constructed, the positivistic labeling of people is not natural, and scientific explanations of human behavior lack objectivity. This framework illustrates how much critical theorist were influenced by each others work and research.