The central committee of Sri Lanka’s Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), a fake-left outfit, has issued a statement laced with anti-imperialist and anti-war demagogy. It “unequivocally denounces” the US war on Iran and calls for “building a Global People’s Power against the devastation of Imperialist War!”

The FSP warns that “rising tensions between nuclear powers have jeopardised the survival of the human race and the entire planet,” insisting that “international people’s power against imperialist war—centred on working-class leadership—is essential to defending humanity’s future.” It proposes “global actions” against the war.

This left-sounding rhetoric is intended to hoodwink workers and youth. The FSP is not calling for a unified anti-war and socialist movement based on the only social force capable of preventing war—the international working class. Rather it is proposing an international coalition of opportunist groups—pseudo-lefts, Stalinist-Maoist outfits, and bourgeois nationalists—dressed up as “Global People’s Power.” These are the organizations the FSP is closely associated with, some of which were invited to the FSP’s congress held earlier this month.

These include:

• France’s Pabloite New Anti-Capitalist Party (NPA), which backed the US-NATO proxy war in Ukraine against Russia and supported the pro-war National Popular Front led by France Unbowed in the 2024 elections.
• Germany’s Marxist-Leninist Party, an arch-Stalinist group, which equates Iranian retaliation with the war of aggression waged by US imperialism and Israel. It calls on all parties to “stop the war,” which in reality means siding with the US and Israel war criminals.
• Italy’s Lotta Comunista and Nepal’s Scientific Socialist Communist Party are both Maoist formations and among the petty-bourgeois organizations that are international collaborators of the FSP.

The hallmark of these parties, like the FSP itself, is their opposition to the independent mobilization of the working class and the fight for socialism. They seek “solutions” within the global capitalist framework, dominated by imperialism.

Not surprisingly, the FSP’s entire statement avoids the word “socialism.” Its politics, like those of its allies, revolve around futile protest movements to pressurise imperialist powers that only politically disarm the working class. The FSP’s call for an international movement “centred on the working class” has only one meaning—subordinating workers to this pro-capitalist alliance.

The FSP’s real orientation was underscored by its invitation to Cuban Ambassador Patricia Lasara, who delivered greetings from the Cuban Communist Party to the FSP congress. While invoking Fidel Castro’s stand against US threats, she represents a bourgeois Cuban regime that lurched sharply to the right after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and opened up to global investors—a process now accelerating amid the Trump administration’s threats of intervention.

FSP leader Duminda Nagamuwa’s remarks at a March 5 press conference, organized by the People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA)—a coalition led by the FSP that includes the Pabloite-linked Socialist People’s Forum, the Maoist New Democratic Marxist-Leninist Party, trade union bureaucrats, and NGO activists—further expose its opportunist orientation.

Nagamuwa criticised the Sri Lankan government for failing to condemn US attacks on Gaza, sanctions on Cuba, the abduction of Venezuela’s president, or the war on Iran, while also quickly voicing concerns over Iran’s attack on Saudi Arabia. He bemoaned the fact that the ruling Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) and its National People’s Power (NPP) has been “tamed” by US imperialism.

Yet Nagamuwa and the FSP have failed to denounce the JVP/NPP government’s complicity in the US-Israeli war on Iran, including Colombo’s silence over the US sinking of Iran’s IRIS Dena off Sri Lanka’s south coast, drowning more than a hundred sailors.

Rather than exposing the JVP/NPP’s alignment with Washington and Tel Aviv, he merely advised the government to be cautious: “Do not take the side of the US or China; both are sitting at the ends of a ‘seesaw’; we are in danger. We are telling the government to follow a non-aligned approach in this war. That is the best thing at this time.” He said that at the root of the war was US-China rivalry over control of oil in the Middle East.

The JVP/NPP’s refusal to condemn the US-Israeli war on Iran is not merely its “taming” by imperialism. Emerging as a petty-bourgeois movement blending anti-imperialist rhetoric with Sinhala chauvinism, Castroism, and Maoism, the JVP has long promoted “non-alignment.” This policy, which the FSP now advises, is not anti-war nor anti-imperialist. It is simply an attempt to manoeuvre between imperialist powers that does nothing to halt wars.

First invoked in the 1960s by regimes in Indonesia, India, and Sri Lanka during the Cold War to play off US imperialism against the Soviet Union, non-alignment collapsed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. India is now a frontline US strategic partner in its war drive against China, with which successive Colombo governments have also aligned, including the JVP/NPP since its 2024 election victory. By refusing to condemn the assault on Iran and aligning with the US and Israel, it has openly embraced the imperialist war drive.

An offshoot of a 2012 JVP split, the FSP continues this “non-alignment” fraud amid US imperialism’s military preparations against China, of which its illegal war on Iran is a part. The Trump administration is using military force in an attempt to control oil and gas resources in the Middle East. To equate that with China’s energy purchases is to cover up Washington’s neo-colonial war and its predatory aims.

China is not an imperialist power. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime ruled over a deformed workers’ state established after the 1949 Chinese Revolution. However, under the impact of the globalization of production in the 1980s, CPP step by step dismantled the gains of the revolution, restored capitalism and opened up for massive foreign investment. Like Russia, it seeks accommodation within the global imperialist system.

Nagamuwa concluded by calling to “oppose the imperialist American geopolitical policy as well as the religious extremism in Iran.” This echoes the phony “human rights” propaganda that is used by the Trump administration’s war against Iran. An independent working class movement must be built in Iran in opposition to the clerical regime, but only as part of the unambiguous defence of Iran, a historically oppressed country, against imperialist aggression.

The FSP’s sham anti-imperialism and advice to the JVP/NPP to adopt “non-alignment” are of a piece with their function as defenders and apologists for the government. Since President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s 2024 election, the FSP hailed his regime as embodying “people’s expectations.” Its leaders have repeatedly said they defend the government from the defeated, discredited parties of the Colombo establishment.

The FSP pushes for “people’s councils” as building a “power outside the parliament.” These people’s councils are open to all capitalist parties. The task of this outside power is to pressurise the government in power to take “people-friendly” measures. In reality, FSP politics function to tie the working class and rural masses to a capitalist and parliamentary framework.

Its “global people’s power” is an extension of this nationalist policy—that is, a popular front of various opportunist organisations internationally that collaborate with capitalist governments and bourgeois parties. The “global actions” it proposes are to appeal to imperialist powers to halt the war.

Workers and youth must reject the FSP’s pro-capitalist politics and turn to revolutionary socialism to combat war and imperialism. Only the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), its sections, and the World Socialist Web Site advance such a program: immediate and unconditional cessation of US-Israeli operations against Iran; full US withdrawal from the Middle East and closure of all its bases; disbanding NATO and dismantling the US military-intelligence apparatus; repudiation of sanctions and economic warfare; full accountability for the war’s architects; and defence of democratic rights.

These demands are not appeals to imperialism but require the independent political mobilization of the international working class, based on four principles: international working-class leadership; socialist opposition to finance capital and the profit system that breeds war; complete independence from all capitalist parties and organizations; and internationalism as the foundation of strategy.

We urge workers and youth to reject the FSP’s opportunist policies and join the Socialist Equality Party’s fight to build a mass revolutionary party and a genuine anti-war movement.