With the Massachusetts primaries settled, candidates of all political stripes are looking ahead to the general election.
Joe Tache is a 31-year-old community organizer and activist from Boston running for U.S. Senate with the Party of Socialism and Liberation. He'll face incumbent Democrat Ed Markey on the heels of a dominant primary performance and Republican challenger John Deaton.
Tache sat down with Berkshire Bureau Chief Josh Landes in Pittsfield this week to explain why he feels Massachusetts needs a new path forward with socialism.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Tache: The basic idea is that in the richest country in the world, we have the means to meet every single person's needs: housing, healthcare, education, food.
The only reason that we're not doing that right now is because our political system, our economic system, is controlled by a very small class of billionaires who are obsessed with getting richer at the expense of all of us and at our planet. We also believe that the two parties, the Democrats and Republicans, are both funded by the same billionaire interests who are causing those problems.
That's why our campaign is building a third option – a working class party, the party for socialism and liberation, so that we can fight for working class solutions independent of the billionaire class.
Landes: Given the rise in conversation and the political successes of the Democratic Socialists of America, you often probably have to articulate how you differ from that organization. How do you answer that question about how your party is different from the DSA?
Tache: I try not to overemphasize the differences because when I see DSA candidates winning all over the country, I see it as a positive thing and it's a reflection of people who are sick and tired of the status quo.
Obviously, there is a strategic difference in terms of are we running candidates inside or outside of the two-party system. And when I look at even recent history, when Zohran Mamdani won the election in New York City and he went down to Washington D.C. to meet with Donald Trump, you would think that members of his own party may want to express messages of solidarity with him.
Instead, on the morning that Zohran meant to went to meet with Trump in D.C., the House of Representatives passed a resolution to condemn the horrors of socialism.
86 Democrats voted in favor of that resolution, including Hakeem Jeffries, who's the most powerful Democrat in the House. And if you go back to 2020 and 2016 and the attacks that Bernie Sanders faced from within his own party, it's clear to me that the Democratic Party is not really an institution that represents its voter base. It's an institution, at its core that represents its corporate donors. And that's why we decided to break free of that two-party system. Obviously, I don't have any love loss for the Republican Party establishment either. It's two sides of the same coin in terms of representing the interest of the very wealthy over the rest of us.
Landes: Here in Massachusetts, it's effectively one-party rule. The Democratic Party in the Commonwealth is overwhelmingly powerful. It controls at this point every aspect of our state governance. When you talk to people who maybe are like, ‘well, how are you going to make any change?’ You're a third party running in this, deeply blue state. How do you answer that question?
Tache: How has any change ever happened in the country's history? If you go back to the Civil Rights Movement, people would ‘how are you gonna end Jim Crow? It's the law of the land.’ If you go back to slavery, people say, ‘how are you gonna abolish slavery? It's baked into the constitution and it's part of our economy.’ And there have always been people in the history of this country who have looked at injustice and have decided that it's not okay just to walk within the lines that have been drawn by the people in power, but actually to put forward bold demands that speak to the crisis of the system.
When the status quo fails to meet people's needs to such an extent, and there's a bold leadership that's willing to explain an alternative path, that's when major changing happens. We've seen that with the women's rights movement, civil rights movement, the labor movement, the movement to abolish slavery. And I think today when you look around and see what capitalism is doing to our people all across this state and all across the country, we can't afford our basic necessities. Artificial intelligence is threatening to wipe out millions of jobs. Climate change is causing disasters all over the world. And we're spending more on war and militarism than we are on programs of social uplift.
When you look at all those crises that are connected back to the fact that our economy is oriented for the short-term interests of a very small group of greedy billionaires instead of for the interests of our population as a whole, you can see that this is a system that is putting us in crisis.
Yes, it's true that the Democratic Party has been very well entrenched in Massachusetts for a long time. The Democratic Party's been entrenched in general for a long time. It's about to celebrate its 200 year anniversary in 2028.
But when you look at the state of affairs in this country and the fact that people really are so sick of the status quo and sick of the two-party system, including here in Massachusetts, we have so many unenrolled voters, voters who are leaving the Democratic Party. The opportunity is there to fight for a change, but it takes people who are willing to take that leap and not accept the common wisdom of the two-party system.
Landes: Turning to actionable legislation, if you were a senator, what's an example of the kind of law you would want to pass that would reflect the principles of the Socialism and Liberation Party?
Tache: Fundamentally, I believe that all of the major industries and aspects of life need to be reorganized around public interest and under public control instead of under the private interest of a very small group of wealthy people.
On healthcare, for example, we don't need to have private health insurance companies and greedy pharmaceutical corporations that are price jacking the costs of necessary drugs. Pharmaceutical comp or health insurance companies like United Healthcare get the vast majority of their profits every single year from Medicaid and Medicare. So, we're paying taxes to fund the health insurance system. And it's basically just a wealth transfer from the working class to the billionaires who own these health insurance corporations. So instead, I support programs like a universal single-payer health plan, where everybody has the right to see a doctor, the right to go to a hospital to not be crushed by medical debt, which is currently the leading cause of bankruptcy in the country.
If you look at the issues of housing, health care, housing, education, food production, the idea that these necessary aspects of life should be controlled by the profit interests of a small group of corporate owners rather than owned and controlled publicly, that's a big issue.
When you look at war and militarism, I see that we spend over $1 trillion every single year on bombing schools and hospitals abroad instead of invest investing that money in building schools and hospitals here at home. So, a big part of our program is cutting the military budget by 90%, which may sound jarring to some people to hear.
But, when you realize that even if we did cut our military budget by 90%, we'd still spend the third most in the world on the military, you realize how far we've gone in this down this path of spending on death and destruction.
Martin Luther King, all the way back in 1967 or ‘68, said that a society that spends more on militarism than it does on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. And decades later we've only gone further down that path and it's time for us to build a movement to bring things in the opposite direction.
Landes: You mentioned earlier, Zohran Mamdani. When you think of other touchstones right now that you would turn to say, ‘well, this is someone whose politics right now reflects what I'm trying to accomplish.’ And I'll open it even wider, like, even in America's history, where socialists often used to run for president in other offices. What are some touchstones for you when you think about that?
Tache: I'm gonna go way back, if that's okay, to Charles Sumner, who was a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, who was first elected in 1851. And Charles Sumner himself was elected out of the collapse of the two-party system of his day. And it was because the two-party system did not have a solution to the crisis of slavery, which was a moral a crisis of conscience for the country. And when Charles Sumner was first elected to Congress, he was one of only three abolitionist senators in the entire U.S. Senate. And his positions were very unpopular.
But despite the fact, he would get up on the Senate floor and advocate boldly against slavery. The first speech he ever gave on the floor of the Capitol was calling for the repeal of the fugitive slave law, which allowed slave catchers to come to a state like Massachusetts where slavery was abolished, kidnap black people, and bring them back into slavery. Sounds very similar to what ICE is doing to our immigrant communities today under the authority of the federal government. And Charles Sumner, he condemned that. He condemned the expansion of slavery, he condemned slavery itself. And over time, he was part of a movement that moved.
The abolitionist ideas from the fringes of society into the mainstream. And within 15 years of being first elected, he was one of the most influential senators in the entire Congress. And that speaks to the fact that if you are willing to lead, if you're willing to pull boldly point out the problems with the status quo and put forward other solutions that meet the scale of the moment, then people will be ready for that. And I think that just as slavery was a crisis to society back in the mid-1800s, capitalism is a crisis for our society and our future today. I take a lot of inspiration from Sumner's bold leadership in approaching how I talk about problems and their solutions today.
