This was interesting reasoning on Furubotn's part. What he was talking about was getting the working class to develop the ability to distinguish between its own interests (subjective class needs) and the national political interests of the whole people, i.e. farmers and fishermen as well as industrial workers. It was when the working class fell victim to blind class forces that it spoiled its chances, in Furubotn's view, of becoming a national force. Then it acted in accordance with its own organic, spontaneous -- and egotistic -- needs. Bad living conditions and arrogant behaviour by employers could stir workers to blind class reaction, in which the class isolated itself and could not muster other groups or classes in the struggle against the upper class.

Furubotn found support for such ideas in the work of Gaston Monmousseau, the leader of the French trade union organisation CGT. Once Furubotn had found international ideas which suited him, he exploited them to the full, in leaflets, as articles in Friheten(9), at the NKP party school(10) and elsewhere in the party.(11) He quoted Monmousseau a great deal, especially his discussions on the working class between the wars. Monmousseau claimed that it had been forced into opposition to the nation by the policies of the big commercial trusts.(12) According to Monmousseau, this oppositional attitude was an unconscious defence mechanism in response to the exploitation by the trusts. It was widely believed in the working class that the trusts were in control of French governments, and the governments symbolised the nation. This made large sectors of the working class anti-national, Monmousseau explained: they thought of the nation as private trust property. In Furubotn's terms, this showed that the workers had fallen victim to their own blind class forces. The problem of distinguishing between their own immediate class interests and the interests they had in common with closely related groups and classes was too difficult for them. If the working class was ever to become the nation's driving force, Furubotn believed, it would have to discard the damaging old radicalism.

Furubotn was intent on defining the term ``radicalism''. He was prompted by the observation that among the many reasons why people became Communists, one, which applied in many cases, was some form or other of opposition to society. Such opposition often took the form of doing the exact opposite of whatever one had been trained to do in art, literature, morality, etc. The more one succeeded in ``épater les bourgeois'', the better. The more one did the opposite of what one had been told to do, the more radical one believed oneself to be - and radical was the thing to be:(13)

Sooner or later we may discover that being radical isn't all that radical. We shall discover that it takes struggle and self-discipline to acquire the qualities we need for progress. We shall discover that the process we have to go through is both long and painful, with crises both for individuals and in the party.

We see here that Furubotn did not regard traditional radicalism as radical, but primarily as a spontaneous oppositional reaction to whatever environment the ``radical'' originated in. Furubotn saw the first oppositional phase as a phase of discovery, in other words an introduction to acquiring ``the qualities we need for progress''. Whatever the circumstances, what counted was the inner political process, not the outward form and words. He believed that the Communist Party had to transform itself into a non-oppositional party. The wartime experience, when the NKP had taken on national responsibilities (an expression Furubotn often used), was an important influence. With the people in need of homes, clothes and food, the NKP ought in his opinion to continue to assume responsibility for the nation.