Northeastern graduate Joe Tache announced his intention to run for a US Senate seat in Mass under a specific set of principles independent of capitalism. Broadcasting his campaign through protests around Boston, the Philadelphia native, youth worker, and community organizer proposes one central solution to constituents’ problems: socialism.
The seat Tache is seeking has been held by Sen. Edward Markey since 2013. Historically, the commonwealth has had either Democratic or a Republican senators since 1857, a precedent that poses structural challenges for third-party candidates. So far, Tache is one of six challengers including two Republicans, a Democrat, and two independents.
Identifying with the Democratic Party for most of his early life, Tache’s involvement with activism in college challenged and adjusted his perspective. Learning about the history of various social movements, from civil rights to the fight for independence in Cameroon, he connected the dots to the general framework of socialism.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) believes that in prioritizing the working class, a collective consciousness can be raised through principles of abolishing war, obtaining political independence, an understanding of international and domestic relations, and unity across identities.
Tache’s campaign builds on reorganizing the economy, and addressing climate change, employment, war, and education. Specifically, the candidate proposed a set of National Emergency Acts aimed at bringing the 100 largest corporations under public ownership to fund initiatives around housing, healthcare, childcare, education, and retirement.
We recently spoke with the hopeful about his campaign. The questions and answers below were edited for length and clarity.
BG: What was your understanding of politics before identifying with the Party For Socialism and Liberation?
JT: I think even in high school, I was starting to feel a level of disenchantment with the political system, and when I was in college, I would say I didn’t really—I didn’t identify with the Democrat or Republican parties, but I still was like, when push comes to shove, I’m going to vote for a Democrat. Because, again, those are the two options you have.
Tell us more about your experience at college in Boston …
I came to school motivated to try to learn more about our state, the state of our society, and also try to make the biggest impact. And I actually entered school as a business major, because even then, as an 18-year-old, I had an understanding of the fact that money is power in our society, and I thought that if I wanted to make a big impact on our society, and I should try to make a lot of money and do good things with it.
But the education that you get in business courses in school is very stark. Every class that I took started with some version of the mantra, cash is king, and they drill into your head that nothing is more important than making more profit this quarter than you made that last quarter. And I remember taking a business ethics class, and I thought, Okay, here’s where we’re gonna learn, maybe labor rights or environmental protections, and the ethics is basically, don’t steal from the shareholders.
So learning that and also going to school at a time when the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement was erupting after the murder of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and so many others … there was just a lot happening that drove me to want to get outside of the classroom and get into the movements that were happening off campus and on campus. And so I got involved in marches and protests against police brutality, for housing justice and against gentrification, with the dining hall workers on our campus in their contract struggle for better wages and better benefits, and I started to learn about the interconnectedness between all of these different issues, that ultimately they’re all symptoms of social and economic system that prioritizes the profits of a handful of billionaires over the well being of the majority of people and our planet. And then I learned that that system has the name is capitalism, and that’s the same system I was learning to be a manager of in my classes in business at Northeastern so that led me to really identify with socialism.
How would socialism and PSL foster change?
People are not happy with the status quo. But in a way, it kind of gets presented as just the way things are, or it’s just the fact that we have some politicians who are corrupt and out of touch, and we just need to replace them. But the reality is that all that is upheld by an economic and political and ideological system that is called capitalism, and so raising people’s consciences about that, and raising the desire among people to have a different way of organized society that prioritizes people’s needs.
A campaign is completely different from social organizing. There are requirements, like getting 10,000 signatures in order to get on the general election ballot. How has that influenced your campaign?
The traditional way in which politicians talk about elections is, If you elect me, I will do XYZ for you. And I think that way of approaching politics is in contradiction with how I think about politics and about how the PSL thinks about politics.
Why are you running for the US Senate in particular?
I don’t really see anybody in Congress, and certainly not in the White House, that is identifying the real problem at its root, which, again, I would say, is the capitalist system and providing solutions that meet the scale of the problem. So we feel it’s very important to run this Senate campaign to start to put those solutions in front of people.
How would you define your main constituents?
I would say every working person in Massachusetts is like the core of my base and the core of the base of the PSL. … The program that we’re putting forward speaks to … the majority of people in our society. … Because all of us are facing climate change, right? All of us are facing the crisis of AI, all of us are facing the attacks on our livelihoods and the political system by the Trump administration.
Every other Senate candidate says their main constituents are the working class, how is your campaign different?
This is a campaign that is of the working class and is willing to say that the 900 billionaires who exist in this country and who own as much wealth as the poorest 170 million of us, that’s the problem. …
I actually think that the primary constituents of the Democratic and Republican parties are their billionaire donors, and they’re the lobby interests that support them. I think the contradiction of those two parties is that they need the votes of working people in order to win elections, but also they need the money of the special interests—the corporate interests that support them in order to maintain their grasp on power and and really in order to not have those special interests fund somebody else to take them out. And the inner echelons of both those parties are very deeply tied to the capitalist class, that the billionaire class that creates all these problems
What does your campaign hope to accomplish besides the obvious goal of getting you elected to the Senate?
This is a way to generate excitement around making change in the political process, but also being able to talk with people that I’m meeting in this campaign about the need to be involved in the broader movement, and not just see me as the solution to their problems, but I’m happy to be a vessel and spokesperson for the movement in this particular role.
If we are able to raise the program of socialism within those halls of power, it can have a reverberating effect throughout the rest of the country. And so I really do see this campaign as primarily a tool of building the movement. Whether or not I win the seat, if I don’t win the seat, we’re meeting hundreds, thousands of new people all across the state who are looking to be part of this type of movement that we’re building, and we’re going to want them to continue being part of that after Election Day.
