  It is shown that the long wavelength excitations of a quark-gluon plasma may
be described as collective oscillations of self-consistent average fields to
which the plasma particles couple. Their properties are obtained from a set of
coupled mean field and kinetic equations, derived from the general
Dyson-Schwinger equations, as the leading order in a systematic expansion in
powers of the coupling. By solving the kinetic equations, one obtains in closed
form the generating functionals for all the leading order amplitudes between
soft quasiparticles, the so-called ``hard thermal loops''.
