I do wonder why this landed on the frontpage, is it because the attractiveness of the basic idea, or because the dialogue here presented some new insight (that I might have missed)?
Where Marx said that hunter-gatherers were engaging in Primitive Communism, Scott argues that they were engaging in Political Anarchy. He kinda has a point (at least when you look at hunter-gatherers who are still around 10,000 years later). We just assume that Marx must have been right since he was taking a diagnostic approach, but without archeological, genetic, and anthropological evidence, can we be certain that it was anything other than hypothesis? If Marx was wrong about man's "year zero", what else was he wrong about?
Not that I'm totally on board with Scott and his critique of civilization, but I do think he has some useful views when it comes to pre-history.