The period of strife in Bergen up to 1923 was a time of personal and political success for Furubotn. One of the members of the new Labour Party leadership formed in 1918 claimed in 1921 that the Bergen party should serve as a model for the country's other local parties: ``Bergen is truly the reddest of us all''.(25) In local government, Labour gained ground more rapidly there than elsewhere in the country, increasing its vote in the municipal elections from 7,000 in 1919 to 11,233 in 1922, a great achievement in such a short time. Extreme radical policies normally frighten voters away, but the radical Furubotn line did the opposite in Bergen.

Until 1923, Furubotn mainly made his presence felt at the local and regional level in Western Norway but that year he emerged as a national figure, at the national Labour Party conference in February. That renowned conference witnessed a rough struggle between the Comintern adherents and opponents in the party. Furubotn was prominent in the pro-Comintern faction. The most dramatic election at the conference was for the post of Party Secretary and Einar Gerhardsen beat Furubotn by 90 votes to 88.(26) Furubotn was within a hair's breadth from taking charge of Labour Party organisation. He won the chairmanship of the youth organisation by an easy margin, and with it a seat on the party's Central Committee.

A number of writers on the February conference claim that it marked Furubotn's debut in the national political arena. This view though rests mainly on analyses of political documents, disregarding the fact that he was as yet best known as a union representative. Nor should it be forgotten that research perspectives have tended to centre on Oslo, as Henrik Fuglestad has documented.(27) Scholars have, in other words, often regarded events in central unions and organisations in Oslo as history, to the exclusion of the ``non-events'' outside the capital. One result of such methods has been that Furubotn's role as a labour leader in the early 1920s has been under-estimated. In volume 3 of the history of the labour movement in Norway, Per Maurseth pioneered a new trend, among other things by describing the leading part played by Furubotn in the trade union opposition within the Norwegian Federation of Trade Unions (``Landsorganisasjonen'', abbreviated LO).(28)

A study of trade union documents shows that Furubotn made his national debut in 1917, as a member of the delegation mandated by LO to negotiate the eight-hour day.(29) In 1920 he was elected to the LO Council, thus climbing to the top of the trade union tree in the year of the very LO Congress at which he shone for the opposition.(30) For the first time since 1911, a new trade union opposition was emerging within LO, this time in opposition to Martin Tranmæl. The ``old'' members had become dissatisfied with Tranmæl after he led the breakthrough for ``The New Direction'' in the Labour Party in 1918. In their opinion, his radical ideas had degenerated into empty phrases, , and since joining the party leadership in 1918 he had begun to expound just those centralist notions for which he had criticised his opponents. With Furubotn at its head, the Bergen delegation spoke for the new opposition in 1920 (31), just as the Trondheim group had taken the initiative in 1911: Furubotn now bore the mantle Tranmæl had once worn. Animosity began to develop between them - both in their different ways the most brilliant agitators in the modern Norwegian labour movement. The disagreements which emerged in the 1920 LO Congress have not yet received sufficient attention among historians, partly because all attention turns to the Moscow theses, which were shortly to paralyse the Norwegian labour movement by engulfing it in internal strife.