Constructive Criticism: A Handbook Speaking & Listening More Effectively in Personal Relations, Groups, & Political Activities By Vicki Legion (Gracie Lyons), 1976
Constructive Criticism is a wonderful example of the blending of valuable and powerful socialist theory with a practical, down-to-earth pragmatism. The result is an extremely useful manual for people who work together for positive social change. Putting Gracie Lyon's suggestions into practice will increase the power of people's work as well as their personal sense of well being and satisfaction.
eBook: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-3/constructive-criticism.html
PDF: https://frauenkultur.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Constructive-Criticism.pdf
Audiobook: https://youtu.be/rvTByQIQAxQ
There’s an effort post I want to write eventually. I haven’t yet, partly because I worry it is too trite, and partly because I’m not certain about where to place the emphasis.
Marx summarized it well:
The premise of the post I want to make is the relative importance of, on the one hand, critique and understanding of what is given, capitalist society; and on the other hand, construction of a totally new thing.
Because the critique forms the necessary basis of the construction, most of the effort reasonably goes into the former. But culturally the latter is almost absent at least in the western leftist spaces. Maybe people are so afraid of utopianism that they forget that the point is to build things.
Marx’s statement is a truism about social psychology. The masses intuitively understand that they are exploited, even if obfuscated through contradictory liberal frameworks. The mechanics of exploitation are relevant only to a leftist who has already committed to learning. The missing ingredient is the concrete alternative. When an alternative gains reality in the mind of the average person, then revolution ceases to be theoretical. It becomes a question not of abstract possibility but of will.
Edit: adding what I wrote in a separate reply
Books like Constructive Criticism are exactly what is necessary for those who want to build. How can communists have any credibility or authority to speak on societal change, if they cannot work out how to change themselves? By improving our selves as individuals, with conscious intentionality as described in Theses on Feuerbach, we demonstrate that concrete alternative I alluded to in the previous comment. The point of this development is not for moral high ground, but to shatter the distinction between the theoretical and the practical.
For conciseness I’ll write how this relates to the OP as a reply comment.
Books like Constructive Criticism are exactly what is necessary for those who want to build. How can communists have any credibility or authority to speak on societal change, if they cannot work out how to change themselves? By improving our selves as individuals, with conscious intentionality as described in Theses on Feuerbach, we demonstrate that concrete alternative I alluded to in the previous comment. The point of this development is not for moral high ground, but to shatter the distinction between the theoretical and the practical.
Marx probably isn't our guy to extol the virtues of kind and constructive responses. Man was an old school poster.
I would not equate constructiveness and kindness. Marx’s polemics were usually justified and served a practical end. The vulgar ideas of Proudhon and dozens of others posed a significant danger for the working class and had to be destroyed in the public intellectual sphere.
In direct personal collaboration, such as his party work, I’m certain that Marx was effective at finding unity while highlighting differences of principle when it was absolutely necessary. The drafting of the Manifesto is one example, because in that, Marx and Engels managed to unify a whole range of socialists to speak with one voice and one mass line, while not compromising on principle.
You also find in Marx’s work a remarkable willingness to credit ideas to even the smallest intellectuals if they were the first to speak them. He cared about tracing an idea historically, showing how ideas “bubble up” through a social-historical process of collective understanding, emanating from a material basis. For this reason he wrote thousands of pages critiquing the political economists, not to be a “poster” but because in their work he saw the expression of that social process. Marx preserves quite a lot from Smith and Ricardo for example. His method is quite dialectical in the Hegelian sense really, advancing the concepts by pushing them to contradiction, and through speculation both preserving and destroying the prior understanding.
I wouldn't either, which is why I don't think a Marx quote moves the ball down the field in a discussion about kindness. I could be wrong, but the first line in the meme is "Not everything needs a response" and I get the impression that Marx was absolutely not that guy.
I do recognize that it's more that you've got an idea brewing and had an opportunity to feel it out rather than it being a response specifically tailored to the topic at hand. I don't think anything you said is wrong, just not super applicable.
I wrote about the purpose of self-improvement from a Marxist standpoint, primarily in response to the book that was advertised, that book being explicitly Marxist-Leninist. The applicability of Marx is self-evident. I wrote a separate reply comment, so maybe the relevance wasn’t that clear, that’s my bad in that case.
Besides the book, the meme is about communication between comrades. It is not a Christian “turn the other cheek” message that says kindness is in itself a virtue no matter who and where. Marx was excellent at polemic, and in my opinion it was constructive that he offered many useful refutations of common vulgar-socialist ideas, let alone bourgeois vulgar economy.
In general I don’t think it is true that Marx tore down comrades over nothing. I think you are repeating a meme about a perceived pettiness, for example in his attacks on Proudhon. But firstly Proudhon was not a comrade, secondly his ideas absolutely had to be dismantled, both for the working class and for Marx’s own theoretical clarification.