First thing to do is work out which state anthropologist James Scott comes from. Obviously American as this research simply projects American post-revolutionary attitudes.
In fact the sheer lack of content to this idea, and its word for word copy of Republican US ideas is extremely suspicious.
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So there are so many problems with American thinking it is hard to know where to start.
SO lets deal with another American first :
"states are organized crime" [Charles Tilly]
How can this be when "crime" is defined by the state. Without a state to record and pass judgement how can anything be a crime? So this makes no sense.
Now the big one is to realise that where James Scott thinks he's talking about the development of States, he is really talking about Capital!
What Scott notes about Grain is that it is the first Capital. As a storable commodity it defines an owner, and it entails protection from theft.
Contrary to being the start of States, it is the start of Capitalism! And it is at this point in history when Humans disconnect from nature and enter the long decline into unhappiness attested to in Genesis and leaving Eden, and elsewhere like Buddhism where "fixed" "grasping" is exquisitely shown to the cause of unhappiness.
So after the first grain harvest in history a community ended up with a store of grain.
They needed to build storage areas, and develop weapons to protect this. And the whole structures of the modern world developed.
With this grain they could hire people to help and add to the community a class of paid workers.
In-fighting in the community for control of the storage areas would lead to hierarchy.
People could specialise in other skills and trade these for grain.
It would have been the start of Capitalism.
Now once the technology of harvesting grain has developed you have large numbers of grain stores, and there are incentives everywhere for theft. More powerful groups raid smaller stores, and it breaks out into a massive game of Risk.
Now what the Republican American has a mental block with--a genuine part of their brain is atrophied and missing--is that society is self organising. You do not need to break it into opposing parts like State and Individual. This is pure unscientific mythologising as bad as when people talk about Souls.
What happens is what happened at Runnymede on 19th June 1215--which the ignorant Americans have destroyed with a monument to something they don't understand--to stop the war they agreed to accept the King, but on the understanding that no one was above the Law. This is Magna Carta. The Americans love it, but they have no idea what it is about. If anyone ever wants to go down there and destroy the stupid monument give me a bell.
We can thank one sensible American for understanding this: John Forbes Nash Jr. who understood that systems can be stable even while every player has not attained the best outcome. Magna Carta meant that if any baron stopped agreeing it would plunge them into war again. Being subordinate to a King was not great, but better than fighting. And the King had to accept the rule of Law or be thrown back into fighting too. For King we can read State.
Thomas Hobbes writing at the end of the English Civil 1651 said exactly the same thing. For peace we will happily surrender some of our freedoms. Endless war is no benefit to anyone.
This was further developed by John Locke a few years later in 1689, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau the following century in 1762.
The point that Americans cannot seem to grasp is society is self organising. The decisions of millions of people make society. And the structures that form are equilibria. This is easy to understand for a modern audience equipped with the idea of Dynamic Equilibria (that my school GSCE biology teacher labelled the most important idea we will ever learn).
We can see how dynamic society is when for instance ignorant American depose leaders like Saddam Hussein and leave a society unbalanced. The result is civil war exactly as we would expect (unless we are ignorant Americans who do not understand society at all).
Now James Scott is one such ignorant American. He seems to think that society splits into the good people and the bad state under some weird forces. No society just organises into an equilibrium.
And the key feature of this equilibrium is the bit he glosses over. The storage of grain creates Capital.
No one ever had Capital before. You may track seasonal herds and enjoy regular kills, but you can't protect this. Anyone can come and hunt those herds. No one ever thought to protect them, why waste the time. They are always there, we just take what we need.
No it was the storage of grain, James Scott is right about. But he misses the key point that this makes Capital and starts Capitalism.
There are no laws, it is simply rule by the strongest, and so indeed mafias develop to own this grain using the grain to enrich and make themselves more powerful. These are the first companies, hoarding capital and using it to grow, and influence people.
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