Adrian Riskin 

"What is required [for state formation] is wealth in the form of an appropriable, measurable, dominant grain crop and a population growing it that can be easily administered and mobilized. Areas of great but diverse abundance such as wetlands, which offer dozens of subsistence options to a mobile population, because of their very illegibility and fugitive diversity, are not zones of successful state making. The logic of assessable and accessible crops and people applies as well to smaller-scale efforts at control and legibility one finds in the Spanish redduciones in the New World, many missionary settlements, and that paragon of legibility, the monocrop plantation with the workforce in the barracks."

-- James C. Scott, Against the Grain

#Anarchism #Anarchy #States #StateFormation #Plantation

Sep 26, 2023 at 9:25pmWeb
Show threadAdrian Riskin Sep 26, 2023

This is an incredibly fruitful way of looking not only at states but at the smaller coercive economies that Scott lists, as well as modern cities. They're not exactly plantations, but they're not exactly not plantations either, just as police are not exactly overseers, but they're not exactly not overseers either.

Cities aren't monocultural, of course, and no one holds explicit title to the workforce, but we workers aren't exactly free, either, not exactly unowned. It's possible and informative to see us as held in common by the local ruling class.