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
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.