Reddit mentions of Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World

As others have pointed out, the hosts generally steer clear of ideological labels because it is not helpful in building a mass movement. That being said, Matt used to regularly get drunk and talk about his politics on Periscope. Here are a few points I recall off the top of my head.

• Matt is a Marxist, but not a ML/Stalinist. He can quote lengthy passages from memory while seemingly very drunk, and contends that the USSR and PRC were able to develop as rapidly as they did because of their initial adherence to Marx's theories.
  
• In one of the videos he describes his understanding as to why the Bolshevik revolution did not succeed as intended, which, in brief, is that the revolution did not spread to Germany and western Europe and as such was unable to marshal the advanced industrial capabilities of these nations and was instead forced to industrialize independently. He later describes the Soviet Union under Stalin as a "fortress nightmare".
  
• He argues that the mass casualties resulting from famine in the USSR and PRC was largely the result of industrialization, rather than the attributable to the economic system. His contention that the reason similar death tolls were not experienced in Europe during industrialization is because they essentially exported their casualties to their colonies. To support this, he cited Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis, which is well worth a read.
  
• He is generally not a fan of markets as a mechanism of exchange, and argued that central planning, aided by myriad advances in computing power, will be necessary going forward.
  
• While talking about Rojava, he advocated for a communism informed by the local responsiveness of anarchism but did not ascribe a label to this ideology (which is akin to council communism, I guess). That being said, I don't get the impression that he would identify as a left-com.
  
• This was well over a year ago, so it's possible his perspective has shifted, but he said he is far less hopeful that the Democrats can be successfully pushed left than Virgil or Felix (I don't get the impression Felix has as much faith as Virgil, but this is what Matt said).
  
• He said anyone on the left should join the DSA because it's the largest socialist org, regardless of individual ideological distinctions, which suggests he believes the left needs a big tent strategy during the early phases of rebuilding the movement.
  
• As is fairly obvious, Matt is not particularly hopeful that left will be able to overcome the entrenched power of capital. Corbyn's near victory brought a bit of a tonal shift, but otherwise his perspective is pretty much pure hellworld.
  
  I think it's pretty clear that Matt is the most radical of the hosts, and even he's not on the Stalin did nothing wrong/Assad is Dad train. If he identifies as a communist, it would be of the more pragmatic variety who aren't interested in repeating the errors of previous attempts and see little benefit in sacrificing future progress on the altar of defending Stalin.
  
  If you're sympathetic to social democracy, let alone socialism, there's no reason you'd feel out of place here. This is the only good active left sub, so it attracts a pretty broad ideological user base.