I think with the hindsight we now have we can formally say that patsocs are distorters of marxism (Lenin had to contend with them already in his time!) and their role is to drive people away from marxism-leninism. There's a reason they are almost entirely indistinguishable from fascists and rally all the most insufferable and toxic persons together. I also think there's a reason the "ACP Chapters" that apparently exist have so far only done garbage clean-up instead of organizing reading groups, roundtable discussions or seminars and participating in protests. If they do it, they've never advertised it. Garbage clean-up is something any lib NGO can and already do.
They cherry-pick the most obscure excerpts and give it the most tortured reading to make arguments. In this way they seem like authoritative sources, giving you passages from books directly. Most of the time they cut out the very next paragraph that disproves their claim entirely. They attach themselves to these figures and also to other orgs so that they get authority by proxy. It's very blatant once you notice it.
Marxism isn't fundamentally difficult or obscure. It's actually the opposite, it demystifies the world. It can't be a proletarian ideology if it reproduces the behaviors of bourgeois ideology: that of being inaccessible in language, requiring years and years of studies to even start to grasp, requiring the reading of earlier philosophers in an academic manner (pouring over every word), and attaching itself not to the substance -- despite what patsocs say they do -- but to the form.
I see this in "academic" marxists too (I'm putting it in quotes because I'm not sure if they're in academia or just very invested). They pour over every word, arguing over whether the inclusion of "the" changes the meaning of the sentence, whether you need to read Hegel to properly get Marx*, etc. They get bogged down into debates that surely interest them and their circle, but has very little bearing on the struggle.
Marxism is not a dogma passed down from Moses, and in a way it sucks to have to write that because I thought that whole topic had been settled and abandoned by 2021. Marx made mistakes too, he worked with the information he had available to him, and maybe on some days he was feeling a bit under the weather and didn't write something properly while he was fleeing from the police! The gist of it is perfectly understandable without having to pull out oracle bones to interpret every single sentence he wrote and the order he put the words in. We are also capable of reason, the same reason Marx used, and make our own conclusions too.
It's like, what are the actual implications of baristas doing "unproductive" labor? They're attaching an emotional meaning to it, but unproductive for Marx only means that the labor does not reproduce capital, the M-C-M' process is interrupted. So what's the problem? That capitalism has bullshit jobs? That some people make minimum wage undeservedly? To patsocs, the problem is fabricated entirely: baristas perform unproductive labor and thus are undeserving of solidarity. But petit bourgeois business owners are actually productive [because they reproduce capital, a very capitalist thing to say lol] according to them. They're not doing anything novel or even very clever, they're just taking a body of theory and turning it upside down to say the opposite. Anyone can do that, Twitter blue checks have been doing it with Nietzche for years already.
On the barista thing, it's funny because I saw patsocs arguing that you should try to "buy the latte, turn around and sell it to someone else", implying nobody would buy a latte from you. They're reinventing the subjective theory of value lol.
But to detach your friend from patsocs I would actually probably focus on their grift instead of their theory. This user on Twitter https://x.com/jonnysocialism has spent a lot of time exposing patsocs' ties. You can see on his account the metamorphosis of Edward from Midwestern Marx into an actual fascist in real time. Hinkle's ties to the feds too. I don't think there's a lot on Haz out there, he seems more like the muscles of the operation than the brain tbh. And then of course go into Larouche, there's this podcast episode that's pretty good https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/larouche and we transcribed/rewrote it for Larouche's ProleWiki page if he prefers reading (said no one ever). It doesn't go into the patsocs' ties to Larouche though, for that you'll need other sources. Probably just using search engines (reddit/twitter/google) and typing "Hinkle Larouche" or "Haz infrared Larouche" will yield results, or replace Larouche with the Schiller Institute which is for a fact presided over by his wife, from their website directly: https://schillerinstitute.com/inalienable-rights-man/.
Hinkle and Haz have talked about Larouche positively before, plenty of times, and Maupin was even selling his books (Maupin is now a moonie because I think even the larouchites wanted to distance themselves from him after the scandal lol).
*To add to the asterisk: read Hegel if you want to and you like philosophy, then read idealists and the Ancient Greeks too... again if you like philosophy and want to learn it deeply. I just don't think it's realistic to expect anyone, even cadres, to become doctors in philosophy, economics, history and socialist history to even be considered an "effective" marxist.
