Jack Barnes - Definition and Overview

Jack Barnes is the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party (USA) and has held that position since 1972. He joined the SWP in the early 1960s as a student at Carleton College in Minnesota and quickly became a leading member of the party's youth wing. Barnes was one of a generation of members, many of whom also attended Carleton College, who joined the SWP shortly after the Cuban Revolution and whose political trajectory has been defined by that revolution.

Barnes became the party's national secretary in 1972, replacing the retiring Farrell Dobbs, and led the party in a direction that saw it attempt to "industrialise" its members, that is place as many as possible, including students, in blue coller union jobs, particluraly in the meatpacking and mining industries. Under his direction the party abandoned Trotskyism in the 1980s, expelling more than a third of its members in 1983 and 1984, and adopting a position that some call Castroism that views the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban Communist Party as the vanguard of the world revolution and Cuba as a model socialist society. In 1990, Barnes led the SWP out of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and created the Pathfinder tendency consisting of the SWP and several small parties in other countries.

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