The Democratic Socialists of America's 2026 program asks you to imagine a day without capitalism: no bills, no debt, no need for health insurance, no mortgage, no landlord, retirement publicly funded, and food, energy, medicine, and transportation run as common goods. Jenny Beth Martin read that passage, word for word, to people who grew up under communism. This is their answer.
Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a Soviet physicist and dissident exiled in 1980, translates it first. A moneyless system means a 100 percent tax: the government takes every dollar you earn, then decides who gets what by its own criteria, which have nothing to do with your work. That, he says, is total control of your life.
Then Sasha Gong, a former political prisoner in China and former China director at Voice of America, says that if nobody told her the source, she would take the page for a translation of Mao in 1958, when collectivization began. Everybody owned the same thing, nobody had a family kitchen, everyone ate in the big canteen, and the surplus went to the government to show how well the system worked. Within months the cadres had handed over all the grain, including next year's seed. A year later the starvation began; she was two and remembers it. In three years, she says, forty million people perished, and the leaders did not know, because they had purged everyone who would tell them. In 1961, American researchers concluded China had no famine, because it was still exporting grain.
Yarim-Agaev adds where Mao learned it: Stalin, twenty years earlier, same collectivization, same famine. Part three of the Surviving Communism panel with Jenny Beth Martin, Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
Watch the full episode and subscribe: jennybethshow.com
Learn more: teapartypatriots.org
Help get out the vote: iwillsaveamerica.com
00:00 — Jenny Beth Martin reads the page: no bills, no debt, no landlord
01:09 — Yuri Yarim-Agaev: in simple words, 100 percent taxation
02:38 — Sasha Gong: a translation of Mao in 1958
03:11 — Communal kitchens, the grain taken, then the seeds
03:30 — One year later, starvation
04:23 — 1961: American researchers conclude China has no famine
04:56 — Two months of cabbage
05:12 — Stalin did the same thing twenty years earlier
#JennyBethShow #SurvivingCommunism #Mao1958 #DemocraticSocialists #Communism #Socialism #SashaGong #YuriYarimAgaev #GreatFamine