"Privilege may mean this to you but I doubt it means this to most USer's. Privilege mean inequality, not just in income but access to education, healthcare, and even some measure of financial security."
Well, yes, sure, people use these words loosely, but the point is that the market creates inequality even without recourse to formal discrimination.
Thornton:
"James wants to focus on production rather than consumption because he believe we can consume our way to happiness and not be concerned with resource limits, CO2 emissions and other such externalities."
Well, actually I was just rehearsing Marx's criticism of Mill's distributionist socialism. Marx said that Mill wanted capitalist production with socialist distribution, but according to Marx he was looking at the epiphenomena of class divisions when he looked at income distribution, the distribution of the means of production was logically prior.
Thornton says: "I think you inflate the austerity ideology of many leftists in the US." even adding that "They are a very small, rather meaningless subset." But Thornton then goes by his tut-tutting at what he imagines to be the consumerism of the US left (even suggesting that my outlook is popular in the US, which would be gratifying if it were true) to show that he at least is a part of that 'rather meaningless subset'.
Finally:
"I suspect under socialist planning the term living standards would have a different meaning than it currently does under capitalism, a concept James seems to have a hard time grasping. He simply projects todays capitalist driven consumption ideology into the future imagining it as some sort of natural human desire. Something it most assuredly is not."
But of course the person who first showed that living standards are socially relative was Marx, in his celebrated passages in the Grundrisse, which I have from time to time, reproduced here.
And of course, none of us can know what attitude people will have towards consumption in the future, and I for one follow Marx's advice to avoid writing recipes for the socialist cook books of the future.
My thoughts are concentrated on the capitalist present, where, as Doug has shown (rather more than I believe) that the US working class's living standards have been savagely curtailed. In those circumstances, I prefer not to join those who make it their business to bemoan the excessive consumerism of the working class.