Communists feared accepting reformist leadership would liquidate revolutionary perspective.

Evidence

This “liquidationist” danger was an ever-present reality in the minds of communists like Bordiga or Gramsci, who saw the Comintern continually placing what they regarded as false hopes in the P.S.I, and negotiating with its leaders directly, and who were only too aware that the main supporter of the united front inside the Italian party was precisely Tasca, whom they suspected of not sharing their implacable spirit of rupture with the entire tradition of Italian socialism. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 118

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: High initial legitimacy made a communist party repressive and rigid rather than responsive. — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 330

Related

• For the PCI Left, fascist repression merely confirmed the inevitability of revolution (similarity 0.81)
• Gramsci’s leadership combined anti-sectarian party norms with mass responsiveness (similarity 0.80)
• Gramsci reads Machiavelli as legitimizing political leaders who defy reigning ideology (similarity 0.80)
• Italian communists opposed fusion with reformist socialists even after expulsions (similarity 0.79)
• The Italian Communist leadership gravely underestimated fascism’s significance for years (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci opposed Comintern policy in 1923 as firmly as Bordiga did. (similarity 0.79)
• High initial legitimacy made a communist party repressive and rigid rather than responsive. (similarity 0.79)
• Communists in the early twenties still saw revolution as imminent (similarity 0.79)
• Gramsci’s shared anti-centrism with Bordiga delayed his open dissent (similarity 0.79)
• Party leadership changes must be read through local history, not external dictates alone (similarity 0.78)