I think if youre reading this and have not read Constructive Criticism, you should read it now. Skip the first section if you wanna get right to the meat, but the first section is historically interesting, but also repetitive and dogmatic.

And, read the manga! Non-Violent Communication by Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. Legion’s work is based on it as she was Rosenberg’s personal assistant.

NVC is a kind of communication that is developed to fix broken relationships, rather than being a set of word tricks, it is a way of explaining our own subjective experience concretely (not confusing it with objective observations, also not confusing different kinds of observations), and luring out the subjective experience of others, like helping them articulate their true feelings, thoughts and observations in a concrete way. The two works are complementary to each other, Rosenberg’s framings and exercises imo do a better job at describing the fundamental concepts and practices, while being a little too light on political difference. Legion’s continuation includes a long l, imo skippable, introduction to western academic new-left Dialectical Materialism primer, that reads like a “how to get your book published by the CCP during the cultural revolution as a late 60’s American ML/Maoist.”

But her practical manual is absolutely required reading, and has been making its way into the intro reading lists of national orgs, branches, chapters, all over. NVC is a fundamentally dialectical-materialist method of comms, albeit one with its class analysis carefully manicured. Fortunately, there was, at the closest levels of collaboration, an excellent contribution to both the Marxism and NVC.