I will disagree with this on my interpretation of "how the sausage is made". I don't think I've seen a fascist who understands how capitalism actually works.
Yeah fetishizing philosophy is fairly common in western spheres. But we Marxists are not philosophers, we are scientists and with that comes observations and experimentation (real world implementation, praxis, etc ).
I come from a natural sciences background so my honest feelings is that a lot of that pre Marx stuff is, while nice to know, not particularly necessary.
What I've learned (don't take this as admonishment) as a ML is that you should always not seek to argue with "western leftists" but rather discuss and ask a few questions here and there which will help guide them.
From reading your account, it seems your conversation was confrontational. As an ML you have access to more information and have more developed and well-backed ideas about the nature of society and this creates an imbalanced power dynamic in any discussion, which is typically very frustrating for you but especially the person you are talking to.
This leads to often unproductive ways of conversing (i.e. confrontational) that may push your friend away from your goal of moving in the correct direction.
I doubt this sort of conversation is your intention but it's something that can take a while to become conscious of when having these conversations.
So for example, when he says "authority is required only...yayayaya etc" you can, instead of going "Actually Engels means THIS", you can say "I think he probably means more that blahblah etc., what do you think about that".
I mean for all I know it could have been your opposite who was using it as an opportunity to "dunk" and thus was being confrontational. But in any case you must be prepared for any western leftist to not be a real socialist yet, and for them to have many bad takes that you have to navigate, or be patient with. Save your dunks for performance and people you don't actually like.
I will disagree with this on my interpretation of "how the sausage is made". I don't think I've seen a fascist who understands how capitalism actually works.