Why I am a socialist Ruth Levitas The principles of a socialism for the twenty-irst century are already largely present in the socialism of William Morris. I am a socialist by inheritance. My mother, whose social origins were obscure, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in the politically turbulent 1930s. My father was born in 1917 in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’, to parents recently arrived from Latvia and Lithuania. The family moved from Dublin to Glasgow and then to London’s East End. My father Morry and his brothers Max and Sol, radicalised by their experiences of unemployment, poverty, bad housing and anti-semitism in three cities, joined the Communist Party. By the time my parents married in 1941, both aged 24, my father had survived participation in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and incarceration in San Pedro jail. My mother left the Party in the 1960s, but my father remained a member till its dissolution in 1991. So too did Max, veteran of Cable Street, and for many years a communist councillor in Stepney. Indeed, Max, aged 95, is still campaigning for the rights of pensioners, tenants and ordinary people, whatever their origins, seeking to make a decent life for themselves. In recent years, notably in Vanessa Engle’s 2007 television documentary Lefties, others of my generation have been encouraged to disparage their parents’ politics and the conditions of their own childhood. Despite disagreements with (and within) my extended family, I value beyond measure the ethical commitment to a better world and to social and economic equality that was taken for granted in my childhood milieu. That inheritance included an early awareness of William Morris. I grew up in Hammersmith in the 1950s. Childhood walks by the river took us past Kelmscott House on Upper Mall, where my parents would point out that it had been William 124