Do people think of themselves as further left than they really are?

“that it would require me (and others like me) to take a pretty large pay cut.”

Comparative salaries or compensation is not the framing I prefer. My idea of equality presumes a massive increase in public goods and the commons. So if you have equal access to health care and education, among other things, what salary you earn makes less difference, and I have less interest in whether or not there are billionaires.

In fact, reducing economics and policy discussions into questions about monetary distribution is in itself a right-wing framing, perhaps the quintessential capitalist framework, and probably just be instantly shifted to public goods by lefties.

When I read the first question, I thought, “larger than what?” Does anyone who is not crazy think we need larger income differences than we have now in, say, the U.S., as incentives? That would be an awfully hard argument to make. That’s why I hate this sort of thing- the questions are ill-defined, and I’m quite skeptical that the idea that if you let enough different people define them as they like the differences will wash out.

Are they any equivalent studies which demostrate that many self-identified right wingers are actually further to the Left than they believe themselves to be?

My first thought was “How did this get past the journal’s referees?”, shortly followed by “Oh, it’s a working paper – you can put any nonsense in a working paper.”

As you point out, why should we believe that moreineq and secfair are an “objective measure” of how right/left-wing someone is? If people who describe themselves as leftwing don’t believe them, that’s possibly evidence that they’re not actually left-wing beliefs, but it’s hardly evidence that people’s self-assement of their position on the spectrum is wrong.

(If more than 50% of people said that they were more left-wing than the median, that might be evidence of incorrect self-assement).

Possible explanations for why someone self-described as left might not believe these include:

* They are concerned with income inequality that is not due to differences in performance (e.g. discrimination on the grounds of sex or race)
* There are concerned with (large) inequalities between different kinds of occupation, not the relatively small inequalities between two people doing the same kind of job
* etc.

Nevertheless, many self-described left-wing academics of my acquaintance, though earning in the very highest percentiles of the income distribution, believe they are underpaid and ought to get more. This belief, I submit, is in practice inconsistent with even sophisticated egalitarianisms, and supports the view that they are more right-wing than they fancy themselves to be.

Really? I think it’s more likely to support the view that they’re taking the rough level of inequality in society as a given, and thinking that they should be better paid compared to other high-earning parasites. This is sort of thoughtlessly selfish — someone who really felt their egalitarianism down to the bone would believe that “Of course hedge fund managers should make less, but I should also make less.” But it doesn’t seem to show that they’d choose greater inequality society-wide if given the option.

following up on Chris @ 7 and 8: if anyone knows of similar calculators for continental European Countries, especially those that are relatively egalitarian, please post.

I think Chris is very right that people in the top one or two deciles (but not top percentile, or two), tend to compare ourselves with the absolutely rich. There is probably some social/cognitive psychology literature out there both confirming and explaining this (for this particular social class of upper-middle class people, not for all socio-economic groups/classes).

I think that, for many academics, one thing that makes them feel like they are not in the top group is that they interact with many people who have similar levels of education and cultural tastes but who make a lot more money- doctors, lawyers, people w/ MBAs, etc. Many of _those_ people make a lot more than most academics, especially in the humanities, while many academics make a salary that’s closer to more senior school teachers, nurses, some police officers, etc.- people who usually have less education and social standing. (I mean, an average associate professor in philosophy likely has a salary that’s closer to that of an experienced nurse than to a big-firm lawyer or a doctor with similar levels of experience.) So, it’s easy for the academic to feel like he or she isn’t in the top group.
(I just realized the Ingrid makes much the same point.)

Don’t Europeans (and the British) laugh at what we call “Left” here in the USA -somewhere to the right of Gianfrano Fini and left of Pim Fortuyn?

16: What does sincere mean? While I’m not an academic (government lawyer), I’m in about the same financial position, and am vaguely annoyed by my underpaidness. And I also know this is ridiculous of me, and (I think) if I had the power to bring about a substantially more egalitarian society, including lowering my own standard of living, I would.

In some psychological sense, I’m an inconsistent and insincere egalitarian, because I’d really very much like to be extremely wealthy. But I don’t think that means my politics are further right than I claim, it just means that I’m not wholeheartedly and imaginatively ready to ardently desire the society that I think is right and would choose if given the option.

CMK@5: I remember hearing of a US study that showed that on average people thought that the international aid budget should be cut to a small fraction of its current size (which I would consider to be a right-wing viewpoint), but when asked for a dollar amount for how big it should be, tended to suggest a figure far higher than the actual amount.

I don’t think academics (or other high earners) usually ground their pay demands in claims about justice.

I agree that someone who said she was a socialist and felt it was an injustice that she ‘only’ earned 50 000 or whatever would seem extremely lacking in perspective and pretty ridiculous. (However, such a person might, I suppose, still be the victim of injustices due to her subjection to the power of those with much greater wealth.)

Another non-hypocritical position for the academic in the 90th+ percentile: “There really shouldn’t be such large income disparities in society. But as long as there are, my work is more valuable to society than say Bernie Madoff’s (or even his non-crooked counterparts’), so I should be higher on the income scale than I am.”

I don’t know how many academics are married to equally well-paid or better-paid working spouses — although it may be quite a few, since people do tend to marry by class.

Comparing raw household income between multiple-worker households, single-worker multiple-person households, and “households” of one person living alone does seem likely to skew the former *way* up if they’re anything other than an overwhelming majority of the total households, though.

Pfui. Academic, two-earner household, 42nd centile. (Admittedly I’m not a full-time academic, but it’s not by choice.)

Do people think of themselves as further left than they really are?

Yes. Or perhaps rephrase…do academics think of themselves as less jewish than they really are? Yep.

you think that interpreting the survey answers the way he has reveals James Rockey to be right wing?

This gives us a marvelous opportunity to test his theory: we can ask people how they’d interpret answers to those questions, and also where they place themselves on a left-right scale, and if then they share Rockey’s interpretation but think they are left wing, we can say hah! not according to the Bertram indicator of objecitve right-wingedness you’re not sunshine.

honestly, what are you on about? why on earth do you pin this guy as a right-winger? this says more about you than him I think. I reckon that on average people answering 1 for “strongly more equal” are objectively more left wing than those answering 10 for “strongly more different” – you’re going to tell me this makes me right wing now?

Really, I think this is a shoddy response to the paper. Based on a quick read, the author makes it quite obvious he knows ideology isn’t a simple one-dimension thing, he talks about ideology implying different things in different places, etc. He’s just found an interesting regularity in the WVS data and is arguing that a one-dimensional scale is sufficiently meaningful (he mentions how much variation in Congress voting it can explain) and the answers to these questions are sufficently related to it, to bear the interpretation he puts upon the relationship between them and the respondents self-positioning on a left-right scale. Given that you also think the exact same gulf between self-perception and objective position exists, I don’t quite see why you object to him interpreting the data in this way. What else might explain how the relationship between ideological self-positioning and the answers to these questions is varying, as he finds? Whatever it is, why doesn’t it also explain your anecdotal data?

I find it hard to believe you even read the paper properly. That test for “sharp divergence” between answers to the two questions that you suggest is more or less what he uses the two questions to test for isn’t it? If the respondents’ answers to the two questions did “sharply diverge”, he wouldn’t be finding the same results with the two alternative variables would he?

Another example of how the right doesn’t “do” science, though they do play at it on occasion.

I must say, Chris’s 16 captures the only variant of the question I find myself interested in, and my answer to it would be: No.

chris 16:

“Can you be (comparatively very) rich person and both be gripped by a burning (and considered, non-transient) sense of injustice that you aren’t paid even more AND be a sincere egalitarian?”

Again, the way you are framing the question is useless and not progressive at all. If you look at the global income distribution, a welfare recipient in Britain would probably still be above the median globally speaking. Your argument would lead to the conclusion that a true egalitarian shouldn’t even demand more for the poor in rich countries as long as there are even poorer poor elsewhere. A relatively well-paid union worker in Europe shouldn’t strike for better pay because this would deepen global inequality. If I frame it this way, it should be obvious how nonsensical this is. With regard to academics, I don’t know the conditions in Britain but I find it hard to believe that academics in any country are, as a group, members of the upper class. They are probably better off, as a group, than many others but that really doesn’t show that they cannot have justified complaints. Further, it seems to me that you are thinking of certain specific individuals who, as you say, have a “burning sense of injustice” while really being quite lucky. Maybe you have a point there but the generalization you make in this post seems totally uncalled for.

Perhaps we should stop arguing about equality (perhaps even stop doing political philosophy altogether) until every human being has 2000 calories a day, clean water, shelter, basic plumbing, basic medical care, basic schooling, and basic physical security. Until then, what’s to argue about?

Chris,

oops, yes I see I got that arse about tit. egg on my face.

(I also think you’re being a unfair implying – which I think you do, but could be mis-reading you again – that the author isn’t aware of / hasn’t thought about the subtleties of ideology and what they might relate to these survey questions)

When it is all said and done most of right wing politics is essentially a form of individual and collective psychosis.
A case in point is the right-wing response to the recent Avatar film–a very apt and timely parable for our time
At a very basic level the film was about the “culture” of death versus the culture of life.
It was interesting to observe the entirely predictable right-wing group-think response to the film.
They all came out very loudly in support of the “culture” of death.
The techno-barbarian invaders who had already “created” a dying planet. Which is what we are doing.

Chris, I’ll concede the definitional point but I think the substance of my point remains. A well-off egalitarian academic who is made especially unhappy by comparing his salary to those of his banker friends could in fact have suffered an injustice on Cohen’s view, I believe. _If_ such a character is psychologically possible and _if_ Cohen’s version of LE is valid, then I think your question can be answered in the affirmative.

Harry, I thought your last post was surprising and I’m not sure I’ve completely understood what you are saying. However, my immediate reaction was (in my old-fashioned language): if we are not morally entitled to demand what we would have under socialism while living under capitalism where would the pressure to transform capitalism into socialism come from? (Marx had an interesting answer to that question btw, and it didn’t assign much of a role to talk about morality or justice.)

Maybe this helps. There’s a difference between saying we are entitled to demand and collectively to create socialism (and thereby secure its benefits for ourselves and each other) and saying, what I think a lot of people think, that I am entitled to secure those benefits or benefits of equivalent value under capitalism. So I agree with your thought about what we are entitled to do, engels, but that doesn’t imply my thought about what each of us is not entitled to do.

Maybe some stability is lent to the view by positing the entitlement to secure exactly and no more than one would have under justice as a self-interested agent-centered prerogative. We all think there are some agent-centered prerogatives (we meaning everyone, or nearly everyone, who participates in the egalitarianism debates) and this one doesn’t sound crazy when stated alone.

Now I need to find out what a self-interested agent-centred prerogative is… As I understand it though there’s an interesting assymmetry between your argument and Cohen’s in IYaE. Cohen starts from the collective obligations egalitarians have to transform society and (tentatively) derives very strong moral obligations for individuals under capitalism. You start with our collective license to transform society and seem to derive rather weak licenses for how we may individually live under (or perhaps protest against) capitalism.

@40:

There was a paper from sometime in the early nineties that found people in, I think Florida, identified as centrist, split them into three groups: one got asked mainstream feminist agree/disagree questions, one got asked “radical” feminist questions, third got something control-ish. Between 80-90% agreed with the radical statements, far more than either other group. Radical feminism was taken to assert “equal pay for equal work”, importance of quality childcare/schools, and similar, while mainstream was more of the “abortion is important but icky” school.

Coming in late, but this something of a hobbyhorse with me: it’s been my experience that people are frequently to the left of how they identify. “Get the U.S. out of Iraq” is supposed to be pretty lefty, right (at least, so say the Talking Heads, talk radio, and any number of MSM dead tree outlets.) And yet, when polled on the issue, a majority of Americans say that, yes, they don’t see any reason for wasting lives or treasure over there. The same with that horribly lefty preoccupation, the public option. From what you see on the tube, you’d think that most people were against it. Wrong. Solid majorities were very definitely for the public option.

And so it goes on any of a number of issues – Americans who say they’re “moderate”, or even “conservative” will by decisive majorities opt for the lefty stance.

Now, I call myself a moderate for the good and sufficient reason that most of my opinions on the issues are in accord with the majority. So why am I and the majority not called “moderate”? Why is it that, say, vouchers for private schools that come out of public school funding have been voted down by the public every time they appear on the ballot, and yet being opposed to them is evidence that one is some sort of “liberal”? Contrariwise, if this is a “Center-Right” country – odious meme that – why is it that very few people seem to be in favor of dismantling Social Security?

I think it’s past time that these kinds of labels got sorted out publicly and applied correctly.

Chris, your remark 43 doesn’t help either. You state that my argument supposes that left-wing egalitarianism is global in scope. True, but then your argument supposes that it is at least national in scope. Both assumptions can be questioned.

It seems to me that in order to defend your proposition (and you are the one who has a proposition to defend – I only point out the weaknesses in your argument), you need to clearly state all your assumptions, your data, and your conclusions. Maybe I would even agree with you, but so far all you have offered is a context-free anecdote about unnamed “left-wing academics”.

Engels — that’s interesting and maybe right. But the fact the suggestions I am making are entirely in relation to the (wrong) thought I was outlining. I think we are individually obliged to make our fair share of a contribution to making the world more just (where fair doesn’t mean equal — some of us, being more privileged, are under an obligation to contribute much more). And I think that the advantaged are under very stringent obligations to ameliorate injustice even when there is no prospect of achieving substantial institutional change. (And that the tendency to think one has done one’s bit when one has, in fact, done far from one’s bit, is very strong. I told my 9 year old how much I give to Oxfam every year, and she told me that I should multiply it by at least 4. She gives 30% of her allowance).

Here is the right link.

“A few years ago he said to me that the old distinctions between left and right had become irrelevant to him, adding very mildly that fools and knaves of all kinds needed to be opposed and that what was really needed was ‘a United Front against Bullshit.'”
— Christopher Hitchens on Robert Conquest

There’s a difference between saying we are entitled to demand and collectively to create socialism (and thereby secure its benefits for ourselves and each other) and saying, what I think a lot of people think, that I am entitled to secure those benefits or benefits of equivalent value under capitalism.

Old joke. Trotsky goes to visit Lenin in Zurich. Lenin meets him at the station and is shocked to see him getting out of a First Class carriage. Lenin remonstrates – “First Class coaches are just the kind of bourgeois privilege the revolution will sweep away!” “That’s where you’re wrong,” says Trotsky. “We’ll be keeping those coaches – it’s the rest we’re going to get rid of.”

(I’ve never quite known what the point of that joke is, or who it’s aimed at; it seems to point in several directions at once.)

I don’t think many _socialists_ believe that they are ‘entitled to secure [the benefits of socialism] under capitalism’. I’m not sure this view really makes sense. As for securing ‘benefits of equivalent value’ I don’t think that makes sense either _for a socialist_.

(What’s the discounted present value of living in a world free of exploitation?)

Ajay is right btw. For example, capitalists (who are not poor) care about income inequality because if it was reduced they would have to pay their workers more.

Okay, well the last part of the discussion wasn’t so interested and it was probably my fault for taking an interesting argument about justice (#48), re-formulating it as an argument about socialism, and then claiming that, so formulated, it doesn’t make sense.

I would like to reply to the original argument with a thought experiment.

You are the inmate of a Victorian workhouse, along with a hundred or so others. Owing to the inhumanity of the charity that runs the workhouse, all inmates are expected to survive on a single bowl of gruel per day, which is not enough for anyone to live on and remain healthy. At the end of one meal you consider demanding you be given another bowl. If you do so, any of the following might happen: you will be given an extra bowl and as a result somebody else will go without; everybody will go hungry tomorrow, as punishment; you alone will get an extra bowl and everybody else will only get one; the management of the workhouse will increase the rations for everybody; the incident leads to a riot with unknown consequences…

Do you make your demand? Are you morally entitled to make it?

A parallel case?

I am entitled to stretch out to my full height. However, I am currently hunched under a cucumber frame, and Fred is in here with me. If I stretch out to my full height, _without breaking the cucumber frame_, Fred will be even more badly squashed then he and I already am. So I am not entitled to stretch out to my full height _under the cucumber frame_.

Ok one last attempt to annoy Harry into responding and them I shall gracefully retire.

I am entitled (as a basic human right) to enough to eat. However, I am currently being held in a cell, with Jones, and the guard only gives us less than one man needs between the two of us. If I ate enough Jones would go hungry. So I am not entitled to enough to eat while in the cell.

Isn’t there something wrong with this?

My view: firstly I think there is a conceptual problem with saying the entitlement doesn’t apply just because exercising it would harm someone and secondly, as a political matter, I think the argument has strong reformist implications.

Am I wrong?

If someone understands Portuguese, an article about that:

http://viasfacto.blogspot.com/2010/07/sobre-o-who-is-left-wing-and-who-just.html

But if we look at the actions and moral judgements of actual prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates, I think it pretty much supports Chris; people in this situation generally did share the gruel even though they were starving to death.

I suspect you’re right and I’d be happy to agree with Chris that in these cases something like this would be ‘the egalitarian thing to do’. My point was that I wouldn’t want to say that, in these circumstances, I am not entitled to enough to eat. Everybody is entitled to enough to eat. (It’s a basic human right…) What I’d rather say is that someone else’s actions have placed me in a position where I am unable to exercise my right without harming someone else (if we accept the premise that I can overpower the guard, etc). So perhaps we have a conflict of rights but I don’t think I have forfeit my right.

I wouldn’t want to say that, in these circumstances, I am not entitled to enough to eat.

But you’re not. Unless, somewhere, there is an agency with both the power and the will to intervene and compel a third party to give you enough to eat, you have no ‘entitlement’ in any meaningful sense. If a particular body chooses to bind itself to a set of commitments, such as the provision of food, and has the material ability to hold good to its pledge, and you have the standing to invoke its action, then you might say you had a ‘right’ accorded by the specific commitment made. You might be able to make a claim to that body for your ‘rightful’ food. But in the absence of that institutional framework, there is nothing.

But you know that.

To be quite clear I might have written ‘…causes increased inequalities and harm to others…’

Chris, let me be clear that I’m not agitating in defence of well-paid professors’ demands for new second homes. (They can all get stuffed.) I am interested in the theoretical background to Harry’s argument sketch in #48 and #55.

Firstly, the claim about someone having different basic rights under capitalism then he would under ‘Justice’ sounded like a kind of heresy to me (from what I know about Justice — it’s a very familiar position within Marxism, of course) but perhaps I’m just revealing my ignorance about liberal political philosophy here.

More importantly, and interestingly, it seems to me that this kind of egalitarian reasoning can be developed in a very reformist or even reactionary direction. Compare with the putative ‘egalitarianism’ of David Cameron and FT editorial writers who are dismayed by public sector workers’ ‘gold-plated pensions’. Or with the ‘egalitarians’ in the Economist who pointed out, re striking BA cabin staff, that they are better paid than staff in other airlines and paying them more would be unfair. I don’t think either you or Harry think this but it seems to me that this kind of thought can be developed in this direction.

84,85: leave the guard out of it; say you’re in a survival situation on, for example, Elephant Island, and there isn’t enough food for everyone to eat well; it’s extremely well documented that Shackleton’s crew (for example) went to great lengths to share food equally.

What they were entitled to, I would say, is not “enough to eat” but “an even share of the available food, or enough to eat, whichever is the smaller”.

I am entitled (as a basic human right) to enough to eat. However, I am currently being held in a cell, with Jones, and the guard only gives us less than one man needs between the two of us.

Well, in the strict sense, if the guard gives you less than one man needs, both of you are going to starve no matter how you divide it. So I assume you mean “less than is comfortable for one man” or perhaps “less than two men need”.

I think the agency of the guard is a distraction. You and Jones could be on the proverbial deserted island without enough food for both and your rights w.r.t. Jones would not change.

But I’m a little hazy on the definition of “entitlement” in *any* context, let alone the particular one where your and Jones’s entitlements are physically impossible to simultaneously satisfy.

Ajay, your example of Shackleton’s crew maybe confuses things a bit as the scarcity of food among them was imposed by necessity. Socialists do not believe that the scarcity that exists under capitalism (at the very least, the scarcity in important goods like self-respect, dignity and autonomy) is like this. But if you return to my example, I can agree that all the prisoners are entitled to demand of each other is an equal share of what they have…

I think most here are talking about a version of socialism that is close to anarchism, but the problem also arises if the ideal is taken to involve institutions. This example also is closer to the classic example of the Bolshevik Revolution, and of the present situation where the end state of socialism is not an ideal shared by everybody. If North America had been settled by Europeans after a socialist revolution (rather than mostly by dissenting Protestant sects and scattered Anglican younger sons), would the colonists have been justified in denying direct access to agriculture to the Native Americans, in either case on the ground that rights are granted only by institutions and only the Europeans had “real” institutions (whether in engels’s socialist version–where they are seen as hindering the institution of socialism–or alex’s more general one)?

Chris-94, your conundrum is of course anything but coincidental. The thought of Big Society is the same thought as that of civil society; it is an arch-christian thought of everybody doing what they ‘ought’ to do without explicit coercion. Unfortunately as in anarchist examples the explicit coercion gets traded for moral ‘society’ pressure to do ‘the right thing’. Fortunately for Tories it also allows the powerful to do whatever the bloody hell they like as long as they can create some perception that billionaires will give their surplus money to charity of their own ‘free will’.

In other words: you cannot have your state and eat it too. This applies to conservative christian politicians and academic egalitarian anarchists alike.

But how, in what practical sense, can one have ‘rights’ without the means to enforce them? You have converted an aspirational assertion about how you would like other people to treat you/everyone into a claim that you/everyone possess the ‘right’ thus to be treated. But it’s an unenforceable assertion, unless some actual institution is founded to make it otherwise. Or isn’t it? I’m willing to believe I’m missing some metaphysical dimension here, but nobody’s telling me what it is.

And is there not a whole, very tricky set of problems around the variously status-quo-oriented and wildly aspirational dimensions of the language of rights? For one thing, how does a language of rights tally with the idea of radical social change in which might involve extensively violating the rights of quite a large percentage of the population, if Articles 17-19 of the UDHR are to be given the same weight as, say, Articles 22-25?

Thanks, Harry, I did realise. I’ll look forward to hearing it!

#104 – sorry, a bit flippant there – I just meant that the entire book is implicitly affirming that there’s a moral norm here and is about the moral emotions associated with finding yourself in a situation where doing the moral thing is going to lead to certain death. I’d agree with you that I would regard someone as a bit funny (or perhaps a really bad GCSE examiner) who read the book and thought “well, is this the right or wrong thing to do?”. It’s rather like Bernard Williams’ point against utilitarianism, except that it’s a much better example because it doesn’t rely on asserting someone to have perfect knowledge of unknowable things.

@alex 108: Without intending to put words in anyone’s mouth, I think there are some moral realists participating in this discussion, and presumably for them, their concept of “rights” is grounded in their faith in an observer-independent (?) moral reality. I’ve never really understood what that’s supposed to be based on either, let alone how anyone can make knowledge claims about it.

@108:

But how, in what practical sense, can one have ‘rights’ without the means to enforce them? You have converted an aspirational assertion about how you would like other people to treat you/everyone into a claim that you/everyone possess the ‘right’ thus to be treated. But it’s an unenforceable assertion, unless some actual institution is founded to make it otherwise. Or isn’t it? I’m willing to believe I’m missing some metaphysical dimension here, but nobody’s telling me what it is.

That’s very true as a physical observable. But there’s a social component as well, and that’s when everyone agrees that a person’s right’s are being violated, even it they are not in a position to do anything about it. That’s just a little bit different than having your “rights” violated but no one even acknowledging those rights.

One of our local theater groups performed a work based on this theme. The plot-driver was an old white cracker who repeatedly raped one of his slaves until she fought back and accidentally killed him. After the slave girl is found out, she asks what would have happened if he had raped a white woman or a free black woman, and she is told by everybody that, well, that would have been rape, and that he would deserve to go to jail for it, even if he actually didn’t because the victim was black. But just about every other character is appalled at her behaviour. They express the notion that she should be ashamed at what she did and tell her she is in the wrong to resist her master because she has no rights, none at all.

Maybe it’s worth pointing out that the central claim I have been trying to defend doesn’t actually pre-suppose any of the apparatus of moral entitlements, positive rights or moral realism that people are getting so exercised about?

workers under capitalism are (pace Harry) entitled to demand what they would get under socialism

The second part of this isn’t a moral claim at all, but a factual claim or prediction. The first part is an entitlement claim but a negative one. All that is intended is that there is nothing which morally constrains workers under capitalism from making such demands.

As such it is actually perfectly consistent with the positivism/moral subjectivism to which so many CT commenters seem to be fanatically wedded. (If there are no [objective] moral reasons to do or not to anything then there are, in particular, no [objective] moral reasons not to do this.)

Tim, I’m perfectly willing to agree that rights can be about what should be the case. What I don’t get is why it’s worth talking about what should be the case in the absence of a simultaneous discussion about how one actualises that aspiration. Engel’s prison-cell example struck me as a particularly precise case of the problem – you are in a cell, they aren’t giving you enough food to survive, in what conceivable sense is it useful to discuss what you have a ‘right’ to?

Engels’ quote above about what workers are “entitled to demand” seems to take us to another level of oddness. I’m not even sure what the phrase means – I could demand a pony, am I therefore entitled to demand one; and either way, will I get one? Probably not.

One certain thing we can say about capitalism is that it won’t give the workers “what they would get under socialism”, because then it would be socialism. So unless this ‘entitlement to demand’ is actually turned into an institutional transformation, it is, pace any purely rhetorical/agitprop dimension, without value.

See, there’s the thing. I’m guessing you assume yourself to be some kind of socialist, what with your name and all, yet you can’t give any kind of argument as to how your opinions about things like ‘entitlements’ actually get, or in fact could get, anybody nearer anything resembling socialism. If I were an uncharitable soul, I’d say you were all mouth and no trousers.

I shall follow your workable plan for establishing socialism by posting endless confused and abusive comments on a weblog under various pseudonyms pointing out the ineffectuality, stupidity and/or of everyone on the left apart from you with interest.

Back on topic. While I don’t want to pass judgement on the merits of this —

I believe that the resources under the command of someone earning an academic salary in North America or Europe are already more than enough to secure a decent human life and, insofar as such people are failing to enjoy such lives, the explanation does not (in the normal case) have to do with a resource defecit. In fact, chasing more in the way of resources probably makes things worse, not better. So the reasoning of the person in your examples is not just selfish, but also self-defeating.

— it does appear to be in some tension with what egalitarian academics were themselves saying as recently as 2004:

British universities have been starved of resources for over two decades, academic pay is extremely poor (especially at the start) and we’ll face a real difficulty in recruiting people to teach some subjects if things don’t change (Daniel—fancy a job an a junior econ lecturer in a British university?). … the likely outcome of a government defeat is further drift and starvation—I hope Blair wins this one.

[…] When it rains heavily in Bristol, water pours into the building where I work; my junior colleagues struggle to find anywhere to live on their depressed salaries. Meanwhile our students, many of whom have been privately educated at costs far exceeding those in the proposal, will go on to earn salaries far exceeding those of their teachers within two or three years of graduating. Time to make them pay.