When considering how to educate Social Democracy about the electoral activities of the bourgeoisie in this country [Poland], one comes up against the general issue of proletarian tactics for the present season. The course and the result of the revolutionary struggle largely depend on how consciously the working class wages the war, and on how thoroughly it realizes the nature, conditions, and purpose of its tactics.

That is to say, it is important that the front ranks that lead the fight become fully aware of the difference in the tactics of the proletariat between times of peace and times of revolution. Ignorance of this difference may explain why one hears certain statements repeated in some Social-Democratic circles, such as in one part of our sister party in Russia [i.e., divided between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks].

Such statements include the claim that to hamper bourgeois parties as they prepare for and try to realize the elections to the tsar’s Duma is to adopt “non-Social Democratic” tactics — that such tactics are a kind of “terror” that the working masses do not understand. If this were the case, it would constitute the sole reason the working masses still do not sufficiently understand what revolution is and how it places certain obligations on the fighting proletariat.