By inducing structural changes, redefining old social cleavages, and giving rise to new class contradictions in the countryside, the transformations related to the development of capitalism also create favorable conditions for the emergence of agrarian movements. As social and political agents that strive to shape reality according to the aspirations of a class or a class alliance, these organized forms of collective action may themselves become factors of socioeconomic change in the countryside. Rural social movements are particularly relevant when their outcome focuses on the crucial alternative between an evolution based upon a peasant pattern of farming, with widespread ownership of land, or one dominated by landlords and entrepreneurs who monopolize the means of production and exclude the peasants. Since most countries come to the threshold of capitalism with traditional rural structures in which peasants are the main sector of the population, it is the peasants who seem to have most to win or lose. This fact, however, has not always created social movements representing the interests of the peasantry. On the one hand, in only a few cases has the agrarian question been settled by dramatic struggles leading to sudden shifts in one direction or the other. Instead, there has usually been a protracted process of socioeconomic change that permitted gradual transformations without major social and political upheavals. On the other hand, there have been few cases in which the alternative between peasant and landlord paths appeared to be a clear-cut issue.