ABSTRACT
Sociological studies of socio-political movements in recent years have addressed a number of questions related to the social base of these movements, the issues around which collective action is mobilized, the form of struggles involved, and the context in which these struggles take place. This chapter discusses the emergence of new peasant socio-political movements (NPSMs). It then explores the dynamics of these movements in terms of a structuralist form of discourse analysis, which we contrast to the more dominant poststructuralist form. The chapter discusses the class and social character of the leadership of a movement that we and others regard as the most dynamic social movement in Latin America today. One of the most striking characteristics of the MST relative to other Latin American rural movements in the past is the high proportion of leaders who have longstanding ties to the rural poor - the social base of the movement.
