An international panel of speakers addressed the meeting, which was cosponsored by the Communist League and Young Socialists. Participants came from Belgium, Canada, France, New Zealand, Sweden, and the United States, as well as from across the United Kingdom.

Harris’s long-time companion and comrade Alan Harris took part in the meeting. Also attending were her daughter Sue, granddaughter Emma, and other family members and several of their friends.

An attractive four-panel display, telling the story of Harris’s political life through six decades of the class struggle, drew a crowd before and after the presentations. A buffet dinner followed the program.

Born in 1921 just north of London, Harris became politically active during World War II. Alex Xezonakis, a Young Socialist from Leeds who had worked on the displays for the meeting, was one of the panelists. “Growing up in the 1930s, Connie was deeply marked by the first world imperialist slaughter and the devastating capitalist depression, which saw millions forced out of work, including her father, who was a rubber factory worker at the time,” Xezonakis said. Harris’s father had been a soldier in the First World War, returning “shell shocked” like many others.

Conscripted in 1941, Harris opted for the Women’s Land Army and soon discovered the British bosses’ war at home—low and unequal pay, and poor conditions. She joined the Agricultural Workers Union, organized other women to do the same, and began drawing broader political conclusions, Xezonakis said. “Get that bloody communist off my estate,” was the reaction of press owner Baron Beaverbrook, a member of Churchill’s war cabinet, after he spotted Harris’s political books when she was assigned to work on his land.  
 
Won to communism
While active in the labor movement, Harris was won to communism toward the end of the war, in the middle of a strike wave involving tens of thousands. From then on “Connie was on a consistent course, building a communist party as part of the international communist movement,” said Jonathan Silberman, one of the event’s cochairs and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist League (CL).

Revolutionary minded young people like Harris eagerly turned towards developments in Yugoslavia from the mid-1940s as working people there overturned capitalism. Many joined work brigades, and Harris was among them in 1950. The revolutionary opening in that country, however, closed when the Stalinist leadership of Tito supported the imperialist war against Korea.

In 1956 Harris joined others in Britain championing the workers and farmers of Hungary in their uprising against Stalinist tyranny. The triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 had a lasting impact on her political activity. She embraced that revolution and helped build solidarity with it in the coming decades. She visited Cuba in 1994.

From the early 1960s, and for the next 30 years, Connie and Alan Harris ran a book distributorship in London. It began as the Pioneer Book Service and is today called Pathfinder Books.

Pete Clifford, speaking on behalf of the CL Central Committee, described working with Harris in the late 1980s in the London Pathfinder office. He said he learned from her the importance of reaching out to workers and youth with revolutionary books and pamphlets, as well as of a proletarian attitude to administrative work and professional bookkeeping.

The international communist movement was now oriented to building parties rooted in the industrial unions and more deeply involved in working-class struggles. There were expanding opportunities for sales of Pathfinder books, said Clifford. He described joining picket lines as steelworkers, engineers, and others fought the bosses’ assaults on jobs, wages, and conditions, culminating in the yearlong coal miners’ strike of 1984-85.

“I can remember her enthusiasm as new generations began to thirst for books like The Struggle for a Proletarian Party and History of American Trotskyism by James P. Cannon,” Clifford said.  
 
Citizen of time, internationalist
Connie Harris was a “citizen of time,” Silberman said. “She didn’t worry if she would live to see the conquest of power by the working class and its allies in the United Kingdom in her lifetime. What mattered was that when objective conditions ripened, the forces that could lead the working class and its allies in a revolutionary struggle for power would be ready.”

Silberman explained that on many occasions in the 1970s he had held different views from Harris during political debates within the International Marxist Group (IMG), the organization in Britain of the communist movement at the time. “Connie and Alan Harris never wrote me off,” Silberman said. “Instead, confident in the communist program, they sought out discussion as new political developments unfolded. At every leadership meeting they had the latest new Pathfinder title to sell to me and to others.”

“Connie was a real internationalist in the best working-class sense of that term,” said Mary-Alice Waters, who cochaired the meeting. Waters is a member of the National Committee of Socialist Workers Party in the United States, and president of Pathfinder Press. Both Waters and SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, who also addressed the meeting, got to know Harris well from the late 1960s on, working closely together with her as part of the international leadership of the communist movement.

This internationalism was registered in “messages from comrades all over the world whose political understanding and course of action was affected by meeting Connie, working with her, getting to know her, and learning from her,” Waters said. “A real product of the British working class and of her time, she was totally comfortable working with fellow workers and revolutionary-minded fighters wherever they came from and however she met them—bridging the cultures and the generations, leading by example, and rarely seeing herself at center stage.”

Harris “had unshakable confidence in the capacities of ordinary men and women—she saw human beings at the center of everything,” Waters said.  
 
Fight for women’s liberation
In 1943, some 90 percent of single women in Britain between the ages of 20 and 30 were conscripted to work in factories, on the land, or in the armed forces. Harris came from “that generation of women who were drawn into industry and into an active social and economic life in a qualitative new way by World War II,” Waters said. That experience laid the foundations and created the social and economic conditions out of which arose the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, which deeply affected Harris, she noted.

Jo O’Brien, an active participant in that movement, and one of the organizers of the first women’s liberation conference in the United Kingdom in 1970, said that as millions of young people radicalized in the late 1960s under the impact of the movement against the Vietnam War, “we knew what we were against. Finding out what we were for was more difficult.”

Harris, a founding member of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and a leader of the IMG, threw herself in to the new political openings, helping to win O’Brien and others to the communist movement and clarifying a working-class perspective on the fight for women’s liberation.

At the same time, “Connie encouraged young women not to let the personal struggles of everyday life prevent them from being political,” Waters added.  
 
Political leader
Jack Barnes was the final speaker. “As good an organizer as Connie was, and she was a good one, as good a teacher of administrative detail and its importance, as kind and generous as she was as a person, Connie was above all a political leader,” Barnes said. “Her capacity to do many of the things she did came from an understanding of why they were necessary.”

Harris didn’t have a “natural instinct” to distribute books for much of her life, said Barnes. “She and Alan would have preferred being part of the political cadre of a mass revolutionary movement trying to seize power and end the horrors of capitalism and imperialism on the face of this earth … like working people did in Russia in 1917 and in Cuba in 1959. That’s what she was working toward her whole life.”

What Harris had understood, however, was the centrality of the distribution and use of revolutionary literature to achieving that goal. “Communists are not defined by their ideas but their practice, and Connie was a good example,” he said.

Connie displayed an unusual political ability to be objective, the SWP leader noted, exemplified by her conduct at a 1985 public meeting of 400 of an organization she had been expelled from in the late 1950s. The Workers Revolutionary Party (WRP) had just kicked out its long-time leader. Harris caused a stir when she spoke, herself having been a victim of the “regime” in that group.

Rather than condemn its horrors, she concentrated on explaining the two political roots of the WRP’s break from a communist course, Barnes said, turning its back on the Cuban Revolution, and a years-long slander campaign against the SWP leadership that cut it off from the continuity of the communist movement. “It’s hard not to get even,” Barnes said, but at this meeting “Connie resisted that temptation, to offer instead a political future to 400 people.”

Barnes recalled hearing Harris speak eloquently in 1992 at a CL congress, on the shattering of the ruling Stalinist apparatuses in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Four decades earlier, Harris explained, communists had wrongly anticipated that the Yugoslav revolution would signal other advances by workers and farmers in the states where capitalism had been overthrown under Stalinist leadership. Now, the obstacle that Stalinism had posed for some 70 years to working people worldwide seeking a road to ending imperialist domination and capitalist exploitation had been dealt a crushing body blow. Harris said at the time she was beginning to understand the new opportunities and responsibilities communists would have in the coming years in response to this historic change.

In response to an appeal to aid the promotion of Pathfinder books, those present donated or pledged nearly £3,000 (US$6,000).  
 
 
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