[lbo-talk] how a non-market economy would work - WAS Re:socialistresponse to hayek

[Carrol Cox]

My memory is that it occurs in an early letter to Ruge, but my eyes are
no good for browsing through texts to find it. I first encountered it in
a filler in Monthly Review, which had a wonderful mistranslation of it,
expressing part in contemporary slang: "It is not our thing to write
recipes for the cookshops of the future." If my memory is accurate, that
is only the first half of the senence, the second half being "bu" and
the remark abut ruthless criticism of all that exists.

Carrol

Michael Smith wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:35:06 -0500
> Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> 
> > "recipes for the cookshops of the future,"
> 
> Occasional pearls like this are what make email lists worth while.
> 
> My own private shorthand for this kind of folly is "drafting the
> vehicle code of Utopia", but Der Alte as usual has come up with a
> far more pungent and telling formulation.
> 
> With shame I say this was new to me, and so I went looking for it.
> The only locus-marxicus where I can find it is the Afterword to
> the second German edition of Capital. If it occurs earlier, I'd
> be grateful for a pointer to the text.
> 
> The bit I found runs like this:
> 
> So wirft mir die Pariser »Revue Positiviste« vor, einerseits,
> ich behandle die Ökonomie metaphysisch, andrerseits
> – man rate! –, ich beschränke mich auf bloß kritische
> Zergliederung des Gegebnen, statt Rezepte (comtistische?)
> für die Garküche der Zukunft zu verschreiben.
> 
> "The Paris Revue Positiviste takes a fling at me because on the
> one hand I treat economics metaphysically, and on the other hand
> -- go figure! -- I confine myself to the mere dissection of things
> as they are, instead of recipes (Comte-ian ones?) for the cookshops
> of the future."
> 
> Wonderful stuff. If anybody with better German than mine can
> suggest a more contemporary and American equivalent than
> "cookshops" for Garküche, that would be terrific. I'm looking
> for a nice inscription for my tombstone.
> 
> --
> 
> Michael Smith
> mjs at smithbowen.net
> http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org
> 
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