social movements and the political being

There has been a great level of research on the capacity of social movements to create fundamental transformations. Among the literature, the question of how social movement are perceived as political is an important one. This article points how the concept of the political is an important area to be discussed, before one can analyze whether social movements holds political transformative capacity. The article discusses two concepts of the political, personified and collective-strategy. It then takes the example of the Brazilin social movement Landless Peasants (MST – Movimento dos Sem-Terra) to affirm the relevance of the collective-strategy conception of the political.