Friedrich Pollock Is a Crucial Guide to the Rise of Automation
Friedrich Pollock isn’t as well-known as other members of the Frankfurt School like Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. But Pollock’s impressive work includes a brilliant, pioneering analysis of automation under capitalism that appears highly prescient today.
The automated paint shop for new vehicles at the Volvo Car Academy and the Volvo Car Gent production site, in Ghent, Belgium, photographed on August 29, 2023. (Jonas Roosens / Belga Mag / AFP via Getty Images)
The German social theorist Friedrich Pollock belonged to a brilliant cohort of left-wing intellectuals that came together around the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (IfS), better known as the Frankfurt School, which marks its centenary this year. He played a key role in the institute’s activity both in Germany and the United States over the course of several decades.
Pollock has often been overshadowed by others associated with the Frankfurt School such as Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Herbert Marcuse. But his pioneering work on the development of automation in modern capitalist economies seems especially timely in today’s world. This essay will give an overview of Pollock’s career before discussing in detail his analysis of automation and its wider social implications.
From Frankfurt to Moscow
Friedrich Pollock was born in Freiburg in 1894, the son of a family of industrialists of Jewish origin who were active in Stuttgart. He studied economics and political science in Munich, Freiburg, and Frankfurt, graduating in 1923 with a paper on the Marxist theory of money. In the same year, he was among the founders of the Frankfurt Institute, which was financed by Felix Weil. The institute’s first director was the economist Carl Grünberg.
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