The following leaflet was produced by the Florence comrades of Battaglia Comunista for a demonstration against increasing racist attacks incited by the “official” political parties in Italy.

On 13 December a fascist in Florence killed two Senegalese immigrants and wounded 3 others. The hand on the gun that killed may have been fascist but the order was given by Capitalism!

The local and national bourgeois institutions have tried to put the responsibility down to the act of a single fascist who in the isolation of his madness has put into practice his odious racism and xenophobia.

The Florence massacres happened a few days after fascists set fire to a Roma camp in Turin. The fact of the matter is that if more fascist lairs are being created, if there is a growing hatred towards immigrants it is because they have all found fertile ground and have been sustained by anti-immigrant laws and provisions passed by local and national government of parties of all kinds from the centre-right to the centre-left:

• hiding your identity has been criminalised (even for the new-born);
• prison sentences in repatriation centres have been increased;
• they have called for mass denunciations of immigrants;
• they have made it more difficult to obtain residence permits and therefore “regular” work;
• the Tuscany region President Enrico Rossi has financed and promoted the building of immigrant centres of identification (really and truly concentration camps);
• the “youthful” mayor Renzi has many times unleashed the municipal police against immigrant street sellers (many of them Senegalese) justifying these measures as attempts to safeguard the city's identity and appearance and to defend the “Made in Italy” idea.

It is not just from today that Italian reformism (including the unions) has tried to divert proletarian (immigrant and Italian) anger in to the blind alley of anti-fascism in order to fragment our struggles and lead them to defeat, preventing in every way the self-organisation of the anger of the exploited.

We internationalist communists say that it is right to fight fascism and the fascists but only as one of the many faces which the bourgeoisie represses and exploits us. It is a big mistake to fight on the same ground as the bourgeosie, that is, of democratic anti-fascism as an end in itself. Working class anti-fascism we call anti-capitalism!

We internationalist communists of Battaglia Comunista express our class solidarity with Senegalese immigrants, stressing that any division between Italian and immigrant proletarians is dangerous.

• The struggle has to be united as has the class to which we belong. All workers immigrant and Italian must operate on the level of class unity and anti-capitalism!

Let's therefore defend our working conditions outside of and against the unions and the parliamentary parties. Let's reject reformist illusions: the oply alternative to bourgeois government is for the working class to take power for the abolition of this economic and social system based on the exploitation of workers and on the logic of profit. As an exploited class let's defend our living conditions, let's work to overthrow capitalism.