Nietzsche, Foucault, Heidegger, Hegel, Zizek

At best you could aspire to be a provincial bookkeep at the local official's office in your village or town. The ancient Chinese had a class structure too.

It is. It's still far from perfectly meritocratic, however, and it's edging deeper and deeper into cronyism, combined with a kind of growing post-scarcity incoherence.

Yeah but that's because the sages were either Buddhists or Taoists that chose to isolate themselves from society and practice meditation. Most Chinese philosophy is apolitical, except maybe for confucianism.

Some of them rose to be court poets and strategists too, in other words, prestigious and honorary positions in the Chinese elite.

Wasn't Confucius at one point elevated to the governorship of a city at one point?

Confucius, Wang Chong, and plenty of other Confucian scholars are all non-religious thinkers who got fucked over.

This. Poor people are generally unskilled. While the gifted know how to make money

With his authoritarianism. He is kind of like Foucault

They exist regardless of whether or not they're being advocated for. They exist today. Always have, and always will.

meritocratic means you're a good soldier who got titles. capitalism in its pluaristic nature is plutocratic

Is this what babbys who've just read anything by Milton Friedman think about the world?

No, it's what people who understand history think about the world. Pick one communist society that wasn't a rundown shithole.

Are they unskilled because they are poor or poor because they are unskilled though?

>Vanguardist Marxist-Leninism and Maoism were "strictly egalitarian"

I think it's time to stop posting

Maoism was all about empowering the peasant class you dummy

Yes, at the expense of the liberal bourgeois classes. This was one of the necessary outcomes of socializing production, to them. There is nothing "egalitarian" about a practice that essentially amounts to dekulakization

>post-scarcity

What is this supposed to mean?

>Foucault
>advocating hierarchy

Information is close to post-scarcity now. Anything you can get online, you can duplicate endlessly for only the cost of the electricity plus the hardware and internet connection divided by the length of use. So, you can duplicate a movie, for instance, which you couldn't have paid for, because you're, for instance, homeless but still have a computer. It costs nothing to duplicate the movie and it doesn't deprive anyone of anything to do so, but you can still get sued for fuckton dollars for doing so. That's an old example.

Another example is just the fact that access to certain vectors of information is now more important than ability to record information. Everyone has a blog, but only a few blogs are actually read by anyone. This is true even though many blogs are of better quality than many major news sites. Basically, there are thousands of brilliant minds who are being more or less buried alive in the wires of the net, and the problem is only going to get worse as the bad drives out the good further and further. This of course has massive problems for paid writing.

Now extrapolate these and other problems to the entire economy and you'll see what sort of dystopia we're headed towards.

Yup

this is depressing and interesting

zizek is just a fat bourgeoise anti-maoist fuck, not pro-heirchy - in fact, as a post-christian marxist, v v v anti-hierarchy

>people getting an incredible headstart like the best education, small loans of a million dollars, the best healthcare, etc. while others are immediately drastically disadvantaged by their circumstances is meritocratic

t. Entitled brat with no merit

try reading a book