The history of all hitherto existing societies

Furthermore the idea that a revolution is the same thing as a war against the army is nonsense.

the americans pretend the cold war was bipolar; a contest of two meaningful equals, since it makes them look better. in reality, it was a war of the filthy rich against the dirt-poor, at a time when wealth wins wars, as it has since the 1500s. broadly speaking, in 1945, there were six industrial megacomplexes in the entire world - my term for a large region containing what at the time were the foundational industries of economic development, namely blast furnaces for manufacturing large quantities of high quality-steel. these megacomplexes were a geoeconomic phenomenon that doesn't really exist any more, partially thanks to how much cheaper it is to ship things these days and how many different industries we have going into all the things we make. in the days before the rise of the computer and plastics industries, steel was the foundation of economic growth and production, and everything that mattered was downstream of steel. picture a scene in band of brothers and ask yourself - how much of what they're carrying is made of steel? steel helmets, steel gun-barrels, steel tank armour, etc. nowadays the helmets are kevlar and the tank armour is partially rubber, but at least the gun barrel is still steel. thanks to the tyranny of transport costs (no shipping container revolution), other vital heavy industries like machinery and weapons want to be as close as possible, so industries tend to agglomerate into these megacomplexes. one of these megacomplexes lay in the northeastern united states on the detroit-pennsylvania axis, one in central russia with twin centres of donbas and the urals, one based in the ruhr valley of western germany, one in the central and northern united kingdom, one in belgium and northern france, and one split between manchuria and southern japan. not a coincidence that all of these are built on large coal deposits. their fates were varied, of course; the ruhr and the bit of the last the japanese inherited became the cores of a very different kind of industrial megaregion, while the french-belgian industrial region and part of the america none managed to gracefully age into finance/services/tech. the manchurian half of the east asian megacomplex, along with the british and most of the american and soviet ones, became rustbelts.

back to 1945 - the belgian complex had been thoroughly looted by the nazis, and in any case was never what it was after its first destruction and looting in the first world war. of course, much of the russian complex was uprooted or destroyed, and the german complex bombed (but not nearly as much as it might have been as noted by multiple historians, although various other reasons are ascribed), and much of the japanese complex firebombed or looted. if you draw the lines of the cold war, you notice two things - firstly, that the free world has a 3:1 margin, ignoring damage. they also get the only undamaged complexes in the uk and us. the one-and-a-half complexes the communists end up with are also the youngest; japanese modernization started in the 1870s and the russian industrial complex only began to take shape in the 1880s; the (horrifically brutal) japanese development of manchuria didn't start until 1931.

But we do not assert that the way to reach this goal is the same everywhere.

We know that the institutions, the manners and the customs of the various countries must be considered, and we do not deny that there are countries like England and America, and, if I understood your arrangements better, I might even add Holland, where the worker may attain his object by peaceful means. But not in all countries is this the case.

Stalin was warned about Barbarossa several times before it actually happened with incorrect info, which made him take subsequent stuff less seriously

It seemed like a stupid time to invade (and it was)

The idea of reactionary communists both baffles and unsettles me. Like, that actually seems like a recipe for the kind of hypothetical 'communist' conservatives foam at the mouth over, which is really just dishonest communism that immediately collapses into typical authoritarianism.

I don't know where you live, but this type is really common in Europe. They tend to be composed of older, USSR-nostalgic communists with conservative social views, who just happen to have a few left-wing economic views. They tend to be quite campist, supporting Russia and any other "anti-imperialist" power, even if they are led by open fascits and authoritarians doing fascist or authoritarian stuff.

i mean usually i don't, for precisely the reasons you outline. if i'm publically arguing with one my goal isn't to convince them; it's to convince the onlookers who are on the fence. you have to accept that you will never be able to convince a true believer, especially one who makes their beliefs a source of emotional comfort, by arguing with them directly. all you'll do is get them to double down, for the same reason people in a psychological state of denial cling to their beliefs all the harder when they're challenged.

given that, arguing at the level of broad concepts like "socialism" and "revisionism" and "class collaborationism" is futile, since they can just define those words to mean whatever they want, in such a way that xi always ends up looking like the next mao. what you need to do is engage at the level of hard facts. use statistics. cite articles, ideally ones produced from the chinese state apparatus itself. focus on specific details, and let others draw the broad conclusions from those details. of course, xi could start up a program to turn migrant workers into fish food, and these people would still call him a socialist; the point is to create a contrast between their bloviating and your empiricism that onlookers will take notice of.