I struggle without hope and, precisely for that reason, it is certain that I will never desert.” Perhaps few phrases capture so well Xosé Manuel Beiras’ way of understanding politics and social transformation.
For Beiras, hope was not about waiting. It was a force capable of setting people in motion, of turning them into agents of their own history and of opening up possibilities where there seemed to be nothing but resignation.
Today, we want to bid farewell to one of the most lucid and influential voices of Galician nationalism, an intellectual who made the defence of sovereignty, social justice and the ability of peoples to decide their own future an inseparable part of both his thinking and his political practice.
We were fortunate to share a space with him at Ágora-R, ECOAR’s conference. And we felt that there was, and remains, a profound affinity in the way we understand social struggle: as a collective process, as the capacity to organise ourselves and to challenge relations of power.
Because hope does not mean waiting for those in power to give way, but building the social force capable of making them give way.
And perhaps that is the deepest meaning of that phrase: you do not need to have hope in order to struggle. Sometimes, it is struggle itself that creates hope. Not the hope that everything will turn out well, but the certainty that what exists is not the only possibility. Struggle is life defending itself, refusing to accept as inevitable that which oppresses it and opening, through collective action, the possibility of a different future.
That was also Beiras’ hope: a hope that does not stand on the outside looking in, that does not wait for solutions, but organises itself. A hope that understands that history is not written in advance, and that what seems inevitable today can cease to be so when someone decides to intervene.
That is why today we want to bid him farewell not only through remembrance, but also through a commitment to continue building that collective strength.
Thank you, Beiras, for sharing that hope with us.
May the earth lie lightly upon you, comrade.
The struggle continues.