Reconstruction in 1945

Compared to most German-occupied countries in Europe, Norway had got off ``lightly'' from the ravages of war. But in Norwegian terms, for such a small population, over 10,000 dead was a heavy loss.(1) Many had relatives or friends who had been in the clutches of the Gestapo. To later readers, statistics thus reveal little of what were open wounds at the time. The war had not only cost lives. The Germans had laid waste to parts of the country, especially Finnmark, in addition to terror-bombing a number of southern towns. Moreover, there had been no building activities during the war and there were also shortages of shoes, clothes and other consumer goods. The war had worn down production equipment by about 20 per cent(2) and rationing and other regulations had been introduced. Both the authorities and people at large were afraid that peace would bring a return to mass unemployment. The thirties were fresh in people's minds.

Anyone intending in 1945 to influence the country's future had to reckon with all these factors. Most people were weary of shortages, and demanded immediate satisfaction of elementary welfare needs: homes, clothes, food and work. The NKP had a choice to make, between the old class struggle -- back to the ``trenches'', strikes and labour unrest -- and a policy of reconstruction, based on the post-war political truce. Either choice would be important to Norwegian post-war society. In 1945, the NKP had a great deal of influence at places of work. In 1970, Einar Gerhardsen wrote that if it had chosen to, the party could have exploited the situation to create unrest and discontent and many painful conflicts during the reconstruction period.(3)

Discarding pre-war policies

Furubotn laid down the basic guidelines for the NKP's post-war policy in June 1944. Norway must have ``peace and quiet to recover its strength and concentrate on the great national task of developing the country's productive capacity so as to meet the people's material and cultural needs...''.(4) Every post-war question must be subordinated to that political task. On behalf of the NKP, he promised that the party would adopt ``realistic policies'' aimed at sparing Norway from ``chaos and civil war''.

This policy, for which Furubotn won the NKP's support, did not reduce him to a mere passive spectator to the official reconstruction in 1945. He wanted participation in reconstruction to be a key to new attitudes and ideas in the party. Accordingly he also launched an attack on pre-war Communist policy, claiming that ``the old limited class policy conducted by the working class up to 9 April 1940 will not serve any longer''.(5) He worked himself up over what he called the sectarian policy of the Communist movement before the war, and said that the time had come for putting a stop to the games ``political children'' had been allowed to play in the party. Harsh words, which must have upset the old hands.(6)

Furubotn was especially concerned with the principle of the strike, the weapon the workers resorted to in practically every industrial dispute. He described it as a primitive weapon, created by what he called the class struggle of the bourgeois plutocracy.(7) Furubotn borrowed terms like plutocrat, magnate, bourgeois capitalist from the Marxist vocabulary for the rich, the large factory owners, people living on unearned wealth. He thought of them as constituting a powerful organised bourgeois group with largely identical financial and political interests, a group with the will and the means to control newspapers, industrial organisations, or political parties. When that group talked about the nation, Furubotn said, it was from the point of view of what they regarded as the nation's interest, in other words the egotistic class interest of the upper bourgeoisie. The working class, he believed, had allowed itself to be provoked by their way of talking about the nation. Instead of filling the concept with what they understood by it, the working class had become hostile to national values and turns of phrase. The working class developed a predominantly negative attitude of protest and opposition. He spoke of that attitude as the ``howls and screams of the left, of the blind exponents of any class forces they see. Because comrades have not yet discovered the road to development, they are turning back to old ways''.(8) The point was to free oneself from what he saw as subjectivism in political thinking: ``We must eliminate the scream in our party, and develop our ability to think and evaluate intellectually...''.