A Christmas story?

It was a good Christmas. Even though I was woken at 5.15 by the sound of breaking glass. Funny how you can hear what wakes you, even though it must have happened before you were awake.

A simple case of eager but - at the same time - well-behaved offspring. I am unwilling - more and more - to call them children. They are eleven and fourteen, soon twelve and fifteen. As your children grow up, the relationship changes. It's not quite adult to adult because they're not adults and, in their presence, neither - quite - are you. But it's not carer to cared either. Not simply that. Not any more.

I still love Christmas. I love it because we hear about the good things in life, the things that matter: love, an altruistic sense of respect (not imposed by legislative restrictions), an absence of greed, a non-reliance on the things that easily make the world go round. What characterises the worst aspects of capitalism, the capitalism that in the past year has succeeded in throwing out of work and home so many people, is that ever-latent tendency to go down the line of least resistance.

Capitalism builds through destruction of rights for the many and imposition on the majority. It inevitably tends towards concentrations of wealth that require the vast hugeness of humanity to distract itself by purchasing more than it can reasonably afford out of a strange and unreasoned fear of facing the truths about life. I am currently not of a religious mindset - and, yet, I find in Christmas messages from all around the religious world the words that are most attracting me of late.

I would like to create a socialism which reproduced the sentiments of good religion, of that liberating Christianity some of us have sensed must surely be out there somewhere. Maybe what I am looking for is a fusion of individualism and a societal consciousness.

Capitalism, the capitalism I talk of, is about as far removed from good religion as one can get. Socialism, the socialism I talk of, is about as close as one can get - without losing an evermore necessary attachment to a rational perception of a fairly random, and randomising, universe.

And even if life is as random as I fear, we do not have to live it as anarchically as such conclusions might suggest.

We have each other, we have evidence of the casual and unthinking evil of the oppressive forces that have failed us mightily over the past year and we can see within our own small and curiously Newtonian worlds that old theories can help support constructively our limited perceptions.

We can leave the madness of a wider knowledge to the physicists who must surely suffer.

Our job as socialists, our job as we try and encourage and nurture the socialising forces that are the essence of all human beings, is to touch and affect tangible worlds and resist the temptation to create mighty projects on the backs of real people.

A good and kind Christmas to everyone. A better and more socialising 2010 for us all.