What? BR and Autonomia had no continuity whatsoever with Communist Partisan Resistance during WWII.
I'm not suggesting an organic connection, but a continuity of a maximalist tradition in Italian revolutionary socialism. Chiefly, Quaderni Rossi and thus Autonomia came out of the parliamentary frustration of maximalism in the 11 years to 1956. Similarly, Maoism's acceptance of the need for an ultra-ist position is derived largely from the PC spurning its own internal history of maximalism.
The decision to bury the guns by the PCI lead to no massimalist armed activity in forties and fifties. There where of course revenges on Fascists, but no revolutionary attempt.
Yes, the binding between the PCI and the Cominform/USSR was very tight—up until 1956 delegitimised the PCI in the eyes of its own maximalist members.
BR and Autonomia were active in the seventies and the eighties, and were not breakaways from PCI. The party experienced several scissions to its left, most of which, however, never tried armed revolution. The groups that did (in the seventies and eighties) had no direct continuity with communist party.
As I was trying to note above, the PCI isn't the organisation whose continuity matters; it is the revolutionary Italian working class whose traditions of continuity matter. If the PCI wasn't going to find a way to keep maximalists inside the house (and the PSI did no better), then they're going to work outside. Quite a number of letters to the operaismo newspapers discuss the failure of workers with maximalist positions to find a space in the PCI locally, therefore their turn to workerism.
I'm suggesting that _if_ the PCI managed to keep a better hold over the maximalists in the 1940s and 1950s other than "bury the guns, and don't talk about that," then in the post 1956 conditions the PCI would have been able to keep a hold of the political space that was filled historically by the Maoists and the Workerists.
It is true, however, that PCI was not "Eurocommunist" in the fifties and the sixties, when it used to follow the Soviet lead in most cases.
I am suggesting that the slavish tail-ending of the Soviet Union during the 1940s and 1950s lead to the conditions where the PCI was unable to:
a) control its own maximalists politically, leading to:
b) maximalist members leaving the party quietly, and
c) a failure to recruit members who identify in the tradition of Italian maximalism.
Thus that maximalism came to exist outside the PCI.
yours,
Sam R.