Negotiations on co-operation between the Labour Party and the NKP in 1945

A conspicuous feature of the new Communist line in 1944-45 was the declaration by the Communist parties of their new-found faith in a peaceful transition to socialism. Provided -- as we have seen -- that certain conditions were met. One was the unification of the working class, or in other words close co-operation between Social Democrats and Communists.

Whereas class hostility had been aggravated in Norway during the First World War, people emerged from the Second with a strong sense or feeling of brotherhood. Old boundaries and party divisions were less sharp and in the labour movement, a strong desire arose for a union between the Labour Party and the NKP: resolutions to that effect poured in from places of work and unions.(1) In June 1945, the two parties entered into formal negotiations. A Labour Party stipulation was that they should join together in one party with no organised fractions. That union should preferably, in Labour's view, take place before the parliamentary elections in October 1945.(2) At a meeting of its enlarged central committee in July 1945, the NKP took the view that the first step should be to co-operate on the lists of candidates for the election: the parties should show, one concrete step at a time, that they were capable of co-operating. If co-operation proved successful, they could aim at a merger in due course.(3) This view provoked harsh criticism from Labour, and the pressure was strong enough to force the NKP to retreat.(4) At the end of July the two parties accordingly set up a joint committee which was to prepare for a merger before the election.(5) During August it became clear that the Communists were retarding the unification process, especially when the Labour Party demanded a distribution by quotas of the candidates on the lists.(6) When the NKP declared that they wanted to leave the final decision on the merger to its national conference at the end of August, Labour Party spokesmen on the joint committee felt that there would be too little time in which to complete the merger before the election.(7) On 23 August, Konrad Nordahl and Gunnar Bråthen from the Federation of Trade Unions asked to be relieved of their responsibilities on the joint committee, feeling that further negotiations would be fruitless. They referred to articles in Friheten, especially the so-called Møllersen report (8), which they believed to be false (the Møllersen report is dealt with in depth a little later). In the past the idea of unification came to the fore in 1936-38, in connection with the opposition to fascism. At that time, the NKP was small and weak compared to the Labour Party. Labour Party demands were about the same as in 1927: a unified party organisation with no organised fractions.(11) The negotiations broke down, but shortly afterwards, in 1939-41, Furubotn noted a certain amount of support for co-operation on matters of common interest in Bergen and in Western Norway. By then he had on two occasions achieved local co-operation with the Labour Party: at the independence day celebrations on 17 May 1939(12) -- ``We will defend our country against fascism'' -- and in April 1941.(13) As we know, it was Labour Party people who provided him with his underground hide-outs in Western Norway in 1941.

When he came to Oslo in the winter of 1941-42, Furubotn tried to extend that co-operation. He was met with some goodwill on the part of some of the Labour Party leaders who were still in Norway, among other reasons because they regarded him as the spokesman of what they called the ``West Norway opposition'' within the NKP.(14) Here was someone different, they thought, from the old NKP, as can be seen from letters sent to Stockholm in the spring of 1942. One Labour Party correspondent wrote that the Communists in Western Norway had ``long since discarded all sectarian politics and regarded it as rubbish''. In his opinion, the conclusion had been that the Western Norway Communists had won an ``overwhelming majority'' for their line.(15)