Jack Barnes (politician)

Jack Barnes (born 1940) is an American communist and the National Secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Barnes was elected the party's national secretary in 1972, replacing the retiring Farrell Dobbs. 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. From the 1990s to the present, Barnes has directed his party to support the governments of North Korea and Equatorial Guinea; has instructed the party to abstain from antiwar or anti-racist activism; and in January 2016 lent his support to the occupation of federal lands, in Oregon, by militia movement members. Barnes was a key advocate of the party's "turn to industry" in the 1970s, its exit from the Fourth International in the 1980s and its orientation towards the Cuban Communist Party in the 1990s.