In this period of labour unrest from 1920 to 1923, Furubotn stands out as the movement's leading personality, and a prime mover in the organisational work in the party and the unions. Among the workers in Norway's second largest city he was on the whole a popular and respected leader. He was one of them who never spared himself and went to prison a number of times for his pains. He was already known for his ability to spellbind an audience. The originality and independence of his character also attracted notice, as when he persuaded the Bergen trade union council to ``rescind'' a Cabinet decision. Konrad Nordahl, who was chairman of the Norwegian Federation of Trade Unions from 1939 to 1965, claimed that that must have been the only occasion in modern Norwegian history at which an assembly resolved to rescind ``a decision by the country's lawful Government''.(16)

Furubotn's role as a revolutionary spokesman at this time should be no surprise; what is more remarkable is the great emphasis he placed on the value of local autonomy in the trade union movement.(17) Another point worth noting is that as late as in the autumn of 1921 he described the unions as ``the backbone of the labour movement''(18) and not the party; a view at odds with orthodox Communist ideology which emphasizes the importance of the party above all else. It is interesting to see him holding to this view while more or less at the same time, through the Communist Club in Bergen, advocating the party centralism which the Moscow theses stood for. This contradiction in him probably illustrates the point made by Einhart Lorenz, that old independents like Furubotn failed to understand that the Moscow theses amounted to the elimination of the labour movement's traditions of local autonomy.(19) Most of the old trade union opposition leaders from 1911 thought that the Russian Bolshevik party regarded them as equal participants in the class struggle.

This emphasis on local autonomy and the trade union movement was not only a product of the Norwegian labour movement's tradition of local autonomy, which was more deep-rooted than elsewhere in Scandinavia.(20) The special weight attached to them by Furubotn probably reflected his recent experience at the local level in Bergen. Until 1920, the labour movement had been federalist: the various organizations in the trade union and the political sectors of the movement had cooperated closely on the basis of independence and equality - without any centralised leadership over them.(21) Syndicalists, revolutionaries and social democrats had stood more or less shoulder to shoulder and even in cooperation with individuals from traditionally bourgeois circles in defence of their interests against the Bergen bourgeoisie.(22) Despite its political and ideological multiplicity, this local cooperation appears not to have inhibited the class struggle, but on the contrary to have strengthened it.(23) In other words, internal political uniformity was not a prerequisite for establishing a successful outward front. Similarly, it looks as if spontaneous militant action had become the normal weapon in the struggle. This peculiarly Bergen approach weighed heavily in the ideological luggage which Furubotn carried with him as he moved gradually closer to Moscow, the centre of world revolution. When he left Bergen in 1923, he was thirty-three, and marked by his local experience of the labour struggle. It should not be forgotten that the trade unions were the starting point of his political career, or that federalism was very important to him for a long time.(24)

Federalism was essentially an anti-centralist ideology. That it should find such a response in the Bergen labour movement is not surprising, considering Bergen's traditional opposition to the capital city, not to mention the unusual civic pride and local patriotism that made itself felt there, perhaps more than anywhere else in Norway, and certainly also in the local labour movement. Anti-centralism became a weapon against what Bergen people saw as attempts at domination by Oslo. On the other hand, this struggle against centralism as represented by the capital tended to obscure the fact that centralism was to become a means of coordinating the efforts of local labour movements. This may help to explain how Furubotn could appear to display both centralist and anti-centralist leanings in the early 1920s.