Paige Jeffrey M. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World

Free Press, 1978. — 448 p.Paige has taken data and shown that collective violence does exist, can be measured and has identifiable causations. He collected the data on incidents of violence and showed that people around the world do in certain circumstances take up revolutionary violence. Paige, using what now has become know as "rational choice Marxism" (which is to say the use of models that are prevalent in economics and game theory in order to illuminate class conflict, historical change), developed a theory which explains why, for example, Vietnam and Angola spawned communist peasant revolutions based on their pattern of agricultural. In short, tenant farming creates a zero-sum game in which agrarian elites are increasingly driven to brutally extract surplus value from peasants via taxation and land.