[1] 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.
The SWP asserts that this course follows the continuity of the communist movement from Marx and Engels to Lenin's time, which stresses a party based in the working class.
One former SWP member recalled that Barnes was unfamiliar with concepts or phrases such as "punching the time clock" or "overtime pay.
Barnes repudiated the traditional Trotskyist understanding of Permanent Revolution in favor of Lenin's pre-World War I position of "democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry", and a highly sympathetic view of the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Grenada.