This is why my favourite pattern within nature, apart from the wave, is the spiral. Again and again, experience shows me how we may feel that we are going around in circles doing the same things, making the same mistakes and never learning or moving forward.

But I beg to differ. I believe life’s journey is a spiral. Each year we go around, and it may feel as if we’re not moving. We’re not making any progress or making our mark. But I see it as coming back around over similar track but we have changed. Through the movement of time and experiences and knowledges, we’ve changed since the last time we were in this spot. It’s not the same spot. Things have shifted. and so we’ve changed. We’re not right back at the same point but moved further into the spiral. Not in a hierarchal way, , ascending or even descending, but more of a going deeper, more connected and centred movement of the journey.

Each rotation in the cycle, in the spiral throws up more learning and more insight that if we’re paying attention we can use on our life’s journey with more consciousness, connection and joy.

I share this because I’ve just recognised how I’ve moved through the spiral this year to come to further understandings and wisdom.

This time last year, preparing for anti-racism facilitation, I was reading What White People Can Do Next by Emma Dabiri.

It was from reading this slim volume of wisdom that I fell into ‘solidarity’ is needed within the anti-racism movement. In fact I started using a anti-racism is anti-capitalism. Solidarity between oppressed and marginalised groups in society is the way forward.

I went on a journey from here, maybe a spiralling into despair, as I searched for a group or organisation to be a member of, in solidarity across different sections of society. I was looking into the communist party, unions, anti-racism organisations, trying to find a place where I could belong and be in solidarity with others.

In my search, I found racism and sexism, individuals and groups still perpetuating the racial capitalist system. Still working with hierarchies and the unconscious bias that they were better than me, than they knew more than me therefore should control me.

I become demoralised and retreated. I put away my radical thoughts and ideas, convincing myself that it was better to be alone and true to my ideals than compromise and waste my time explaining or highlighting blind spots to so-called comrades.

And then these part few days, solidarity has raised its head again but through a different door. Through the door of abolitionism.

Ours is a fight against powerful systems of violence and terror.

 In recognising the interconnectedness of systems of state violence, abolition can be the basis of a new solidarity: one that acknowledges specific experiences of violence in particular communities, whilst building a unified, internationalist resistance.

Abolition doesn’t understand the concept of solidarity as an airy-fairy call for different oppressed groups to ‘just get along’. Solidarity is a vital strategic response to the prevalence and ubiquity of state violence. 

Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean

As we have witnessed in the recent council elections, with the surge in the popularity of Reform. This isn’t because this party has set out a manifesto of policies that will solve the issues of poverty, unemployment, economic crisis, the state of the NHS, the policing in our schools and stop crime such as rapes and murders. No this party, it just playing out the age out trick of creating the ‘enemies within’. The ‘enemies within’ can carry all the responsibility for what’s wrong within British society today. The immigrants, the refugees, the gangs, the nasty women, the people with darker skin who are innately hardwired for crime. The general public, usually predominately working class white people, can blame others, other oppressed and marginalised people for all the woes of society. Smokescreens and mirrors, instead of people coming together, across class, race, gender, sexuality, religious lines, in solidarity and challenging racial capitalism and state control and violence which are geared towards keeping the majority of people in poverty at each other’s throats instead. While a few, usually white cis-gendered men, retain wealth, control and power.

I say Reform, but the present ‘Labour’ government operates the same way. They’re all apparatus of the State working to keep power and control through violence and terror in the hands of the few.

 So for them the problem is not the historic experience of racism and the legacies of slavery and colonialism: it’s Black ‘gangsters’ on our streets. It’s not disinvestment from and neglect of working class communities: it’s Syrian migrants in our hospitals. It’s not military and imperial domination of vast swathes of the world: it’s Muslim extremists in our schools. Constructed ‘enemies within’ like these provide a constant justification for the use and expansion of state violence in order to maintain control; they tie people’s lived experience of the world to divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of ordinary people. – Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean

I see the value of solidarity now, in building power in the direction of marginalised groups because it weakens the State’s power and control which is based on divisive narratives that weaken the collective consciousness of everyday people. The marginalised and oppressed.

Now maybe if I had this knowledge, last year, cycling and spiralling looking for my tribe, I might have stuck it out a little longer. Allowed our differences and bias to take a back seat because I believed we were working together across solidarity lines. Maybe.

This year though, with another trip around the sun under my belt, and another spiral deeper into my learning, I believe my solidarity within these groups would have still faltered as within and outside of these groups because they are not spurred on from the foundations upwards and onward with an abolitionist revolutionary thought and praxis.

I see now that these groups are looking toward reform rather than abolition. They are satisfied with tinkering with the edges. Gaining small concessions rather than a total overhaul. It’s like asking for and being satisfied with a more comfortable prison cell as a demonstration of change in how the State handles inmates instead of defunding/ abolishing the prison industrial complex all together.

I see that now as I continue to spiral towards consciousness, again and again. Onwards.