Jack Barnes
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Template:NPOV Jack Barnes (born in 1940) is the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party 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. During his tenure in blue coller union jobs, particularly in the meatpacking and mining industries. In the 1980s the SWP abandoned Trotskyism, 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.
Jack Barnes is the author of such marxist-political books as Capitalism's World Disorder, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, Their Trotsky and Ours, U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War, Capitalism's Long Hot Winter Has Begun and The Lesser Evil? - Debates on the Democratic Party and Independent Working-Class Politics.