Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

Before the creation of more centralized political structures like the state, what Marshall Sahlins has described as the domestic mode of production prevailed.2 Access to resources—land, pasture, hunting—was open to all by virtue of membership in a group, whether tribe, band, lineage, or family, that controlled those resources. Short of being cast out, an individual could not be denied direct and independent access to whatever means of subsistence the group in question disposed of. And in the absence of either compulsion or the chance of capitalist accumulation, there was no incentive to produce beyond the locally prevailing standards of subsistence and comfort. Beyond sufficiency in this respect, that is, there was no reason to increase the drudgery of agricultural production. The logic of this variant of peasant economy was worked out in convincing empirical detail by A. V. Chayanov, who, among other things, showed that when a family had more working members than nonworking dependents, it reduced its overall work effort once sufficiency was assured.