As the presidential primary season gets under way and the Democratic roster becomes increasingly packed with candidates looking to go toe-to-toe with President Trump in 2020, things have taken a nasty turn after Sen. Amy Klobuchar publicly attacked Sen. Cory Booker as “an electoralist hack” with “absolutely no handle on dialectical materialism.”
“How can Booker even begin to hope to represent the proletariat masses if his understanding of Marxism doesn’t extend beyond the most superficial interpretations of the labor theory of value?” Klobuchar asked a crowd at a campaign stop outside Akron, to raucous applause. “I mean, I’d like to think he has a meaningful stance on the question of labor notes versus wage abolition, but his campaign website barely mentions syndicalist praxis!”
In a tweet posted later that day, Booker — an outspoken member of the Maoist Third World tradition — shot back at Klobuchar for being “divisive” and “a bourgeois shill.”
“The idea that I’m going to be lectured at by someone whose notion of permanent revolution barely touches on the role of colonialism in global inequality is laughable,” he wrote. “#booker2020 #MaoistThirdWorld #eattherich.”
Klobuchar’s attack follows similar accusations by Pete Buttigieg — the anarcho-collectivist mayor of South Bend, Indiana — who last week criticized Booker for a “foolish and counter-revolutionary reliance on a vanguard party in place of legitimate mass action.”
Yet even as the campaign season puts the candidates at each other’s throats, Klobuchar and Booker both agreed that the real enemy was Sen. Bernie Sanders, who they described in a joint press release as “well-intentioned” but nevertheless “barely anti-capitalist” and “a centrist by any reasonable measure.”
