be sincere and open, refrain from hurting others by thoughtless or sarcastic remarks and, in particular, refrain from irresponsibly criticizing comrades behind their backs. The proper attitude to any comrade’s mistakes is sincerely to remonstrate with him and criticize him to his face, out of concern for the comrade and a desire to be of help.

I had a thought the other day that was unfortunately spurred by disagreements in the group chat of an in-person org: I don’t think leftist orgs should have group chats, message boards, or any other sort of inward-facing social media.

1. Social media (and big group chats are basically that) could not be better designed to produce misunderstandings and amplify conflicts. The “criticize someone to their face” part of this reading is how you minimize this.
2. Internal social media is essentially an ongoing, informal meeting. To those active on internal social media, your actual meetings seem to re-hash a lot of old conversations. To those who aren’t active on internal social media, your actual meetings seem like jumping in halfway through an ongoing discussion.
3. In-person meetings have practical time and attention constraints. These force your group to efficiently address a manageable number of issues. Online, you can argue endlessly about everything under the sun. You will generate disagreements you don’t need to have right now on topics increasingly far from what your group is actually doing in real life.

I think the corollary to “criticize people face-to-face” is “start with a one-on-one conversation, and don’t spring a group call-out on anyone.”