Turn To Industry
Barnes was one of the central organizers for the idea that the party should 'Turn to Industry'. In 1978 the party's National Committee approved a report by Barnes which argued that "we must subordinate everything else to immediately organizing to get a large majority of the membership of the SWP into industry and the industrial trade unions". Socialist Workers Party SWP members took up union jobs in basic industries such as meatpacking, steel, mining and textile industries.
Work within these industries became a condition of membership in the SWP, as the party attempts to penetrate into the portions of the working class that it feels will be most combative and open to communist ideas in the future: those unionized in basic industries. Party members organized within these unions form fractions within the party. The SWP asserts that this course follows the continuity of the communist movement from Marx and Engels to Lenin's time, which stress a party based in the working class.
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