Tatiana Grigorovici

Tatiana Grigorovici (1905)

Tatiana Grigorovici , née Pistermann , (born March 31, 1877 in Kamenetz ; † September 25, 1952 ) was a Marxist economist from the school of Austromarxism .

Origin and youth

Born in 1877 as the 14th child of a wealthy Jewish merchant family in Kamenetz, Tatiana Pistermann was one of the few women of her generation who were able to complete a university degree. In Vienna and Bern she devoted herself to studying philosophy and economics and discovered her fascination for Marxism, especially for economic writings and Marxian capital . Tatiana Pistermann studied together with socialist theorists who later rose to world fame, such as Rudolf Hilferding , Otto Bauer , Max Adler and Karl Renner , with whom she exchanged intensively. She was the only woman in this intellectual network that later came to be known as Austromarxism . In socialist student circles, Tatiana Pisterman also met Gheorghe Grigorovici (1871–1950), a Romanian medical student and active socialist. The two became a couple and married in 1903.

Scientific achievements

In her dissertation, defended in 1906 at the Chair of Economics at Bern University, which was first published in 1908, Tatiana Grigorovici dealt with Marxist labor theory. She devoted herself particularly to the differences between the concept of value used by Karl Marx and Ferdinand Lassalle . Grigorovici thus took part in an intensive discussion at the time about the interpretation of capital and clarified the Marxian concept of “socially necessary work” in relation to Lassallean interpretations popular at the time. By clarifying the concept of value, she also positioned herself in the debate about the marginal utility theory of bourgeois economies such as Eugen Böhm-Bawerk. Grigorovici defended Marx's theory of value, which was based on production and labor, against theories based on use value, according to which price and value are not based on production, but solely on benefit for the buyer. Her dissertation was reprinted a second time in 1910 in the Marx Studies series published by Rudolf Hilferding and received a lot of attention at the time; In the course of renewed interest in Marx's theory of value, the hard-to-find work was reprinted in 1971.

Political engagement and profession

After completing her dissertation, Tatiana Grigorovici turned down the offer of a lectureship at the University of Bern in order to get involved with Austrian social democracy together with her husband. She worked in educational associations, published in the journal Der Klassenkampf ( The Class Struggle) published by the Social Democratic Workers' Party in Bukovina , wrote introductions to scientific socialism and translated Karl Kautsky's Thomas More and his Utopia into Romanian for the first time.

After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the formation of the independent Romanian state, Tatiana Grigorovici worked as the director of an insurance company in the 1920s, and later as the commercial director of a women's clinic. In addition, she became involved in an Austro-Marxist working group in Olăneşti from 1921 . Her husband Gheorghe was committed to the merger of Romania's socialist parties and became a senator.

In 1936 she and her family moved to Bucharest to facilitate his academic career as a physicist for Son Radu Grigorovici . The family survived the Second World War and the Holocaust relatively unscathed, only Radu Grigorovici was forced to do forced labor during the German occupation from 1941 because of his Jewish origins.

Dissidence in Romania after 1945

The Grigorovici couple came into conflict with the Stalinist rulers in post-war Romania because of their adherence to the Austro-Marxist interpretation of socialism. Gheorghe was arrested by the Securitate secret police in 1949 and died in custody in 1950. An intervention by Tatiana with the then Labor Minister Lothar Radaceanu to convert the prison into house arrest had failed. Tatiana Grigorovici then wrote to Radaceanu bitterly:

“GG died at the age of 79 in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. I suggest you practice self-criticism and determine in an objective way whether G. Grigorovici deserves this tragic fate and which of you two betrayed the ideals. "

Tatiana Grigorovici spent the last two years of her life in constant fear of arrest. In July 1950, she wrote a political will in which she, as a precaution, distanced herself from possible extorted confessions such as those used in other cases in show trials. On September 25, 1952, Tatiana Grigorovici committed suicide in order to avoid the feared imprisonment.

Fonts

• Tatiana Grigorovici: The theory of values ​​in Marx and Lassalle. Contribution to the history of a scientific misunderstanding . Bern Phil. Diss. 1907-08 (initially self-published, Vienna 1908; second edition as the third volume of the series Marx Studies published by Rudolf Hilferding and Max Adler , Vienna 1910; reprint of this edition Glashütten im Taunus 1971).

literature

• Horst Klein: Tatiana Grigorovici (1877–1952). On the 60th anniversary of the death of the Austromarxist. In: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement . Issue No. III / 2012, pp. 132–141.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Horst Klein: Tatiana Grigorovici (1877-1952). On the 60th anniversary of the Austromarxist's death In: Year Book for Research on the History of the Labor Movement No. III / 2012, pp. 139f.