Lloyd George

Lenin is the politician of revolution. Mussollini is the politician of reaction. Lloyd George is the politician of compromise, transaction, and reform. Eclectic, a tightrope walker and mediator, equally far from the left and the right, Lloyd George is a proponent of neither the new order nor the old. Neither clinging to the past nor impatient for the future, Lloyd George aspires to be no more than an artisan, a builder of the present. He is a man without dogmatic, sectarian, rigid persuasion. He is neither an individualist nor a collectivist, an internationalist or a nationalist. He commands British liberalism, but this label of liberal owes itself to reasons of electoral classification more than ideological demarcation. Liberalism and conservatism are today two outdated and deformed political schools. What we are witnessing today is not a dialectical conflict between the liberal and the conservative ideas, but rather a real contrast, an historic clash between the inclination to maintain capitalist social organization, and the inclination to replace it with a socialist and proletarian organization.

Lloyd George is not a theoretician, a high priest of any economic or political doctrine; he is an almost agnostic conciliator. He lacks rigid points of view. Those he does have are provisional, unstable, precarious and mobile. Lloyd George presents himself in constant rectification, permanent revision of his ideas. He is, then, poorly suited for apostasy, which supposes a shift from one extremist position to another extremist, antagonistic position, for Lloyd George invariably occupies a centrist, transactional, intermediary position. His shifts are consequently not radical or violent but gradual and minute. Lloyd George is, structurally, a possibilist politician. He thinks that the straight line is, in politics as in geometry, a theoretical and imaginative one. The surface of political reality is uneven like the surface of the Earth, upon which one can draw geodesic lines, but not straight ones. In politics, Lloyd George does not, therefore, search for the ideal route, but the most geodesic one.

For this cautious, recalcitrant and discerning politician, today is a transaction between yesterday and tomorrow. Lloyd George does not preoccupy himself with what has been or what will be, but with that which is.

Neither learned nor erudite, Lloyd George is, above all, resistant to erudition and pedantry. This condition and his lack of faith in any doctrine save him from ideological rigidity and systematic principles. Diametrically opposite the professor, Lloyd George is a politician of fine sensibility, gifted with agile faculties for original, objective and clear perception of facts. He is neither a commentator nor a spectator, but rather a protagonist, a conscious historical actor. His political retina is equipped for the rapid and stereoscopic intuition of the surrounding panorama. His lack of apprehensions and dogmatic scruples permit him to use the most adequate instruments and procedures for his intentions. Lloyd George assimilates and instantly absorbs the suggestions and ideas useful to his spiritual orientation. He is an informed, sagacious and flexible opportunist, he is never intractable. He tries to modify the potential reality, in line with his predictions, but if he finds in that reality excessive resistance, he contents himself with exerting a minimal influence on it. He does not insist on immature offensives; he reserves his insistence, his tenacity, for the propitious occasion, for the opportune moment. And he is always ready to deal and to compromise. His governing strategy consists in not reacting abruptly to popular sentiments and passions, but in adapting himself to them in order to deftly channel and dominate them.

For example, Lloyd George’s participation in the Versailles Peace is saturated with his opportunism and possibilism. Lloyd George understood that Germany could not pay excessive reparations; but the delirious, frenetic, and hysterical atmosphere of victory obliged him to provisionally go against his own belief. The English taxpayer, eager for war costs not to weigh on his wallet and poorly informed about Germany’s economic capacity, wanted the latter to pay the full cost of the war. Under this mood’s influence, elections were held, hastily convoked by Lloyd George immediately following the armistice. And in order not to run the risk of defeat, Lloyd George had to fold this aspiration of the English electorate into his electoral platform. He had to make the peace program of Lord Northcliffe and the Times, furious enemies of his politics, his own.

Lloyd George was equally opposed to the idea that the treaty should mutilate and dismember Germany and enlarge France’s territory. He perceived the danger of disorganizing and disarticulating the German economy. As a result, he fought the military occupation of the left bank of the Rhine. He resisted all French conspiring against German unity, but he would end up tolerating their infiltration of the treaty. He wanted, above all else, to save the Entente and the peace. He believed that it was not the right moment to frustrate French intentions; that, as spirits were enlightened and the delirium of victory faded away, they would automatically make way for the Paulitine rectification of the Treaty; that its consequences, pregnant with threats to Europe’s future, would urge the victors to apply it with prudence and leniency. In his The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Keynes comments on this process: “Lloyd George has assumed responsibility for a foolish, partially inexecutable treaty, which constitutes a danger to Europe’s very life. He can plead, once all its defects have been recognized, that the public’s ignorant passions play in the world a role which should be kept in mind by those who lead a democracy. He can say that the Versailles Peace constituted the best provisional regulations to allow for the popular complaints and the character of the heads of state. He can claim that, to defend Europe’s life, he has, for two years, devoted his skills and efforts to avoiding and moderating the danger.” (Translator’s note: in searching for the original English quote, I have come up short; not only did I not find a matching quote in the English edition of Keynes’ Economic Consequences, but the Spanish edition lacks the quote in question as well. This quote is thus translated from the Spanish and does not reflect the corresponding original, which in any case has been misattributed by Mariátegui. Any assistance in finding which work Mariátegui is referencing would be greatly appreciated).

After the peace, from 1920-1922, Lloyd George has made successive formal and de rigeur concessions to the French point of view: he has accepted the dogma of intangibility, of the infallibility of the Treaty. But he has worked persistently to draw France into a tactically revisionist policy, and to encourage the forgetting of the harshest stipulations, the abandonment of the most imprudent clauses.

Faced with the Russian revolution, Lloyd George has maintained an elastic attitude. On occasion, he has dramatically stood up against it; other times he has stealthily flirted with it. At first, he subscribed to the policy of embargo and the military intervention of the Entente. Later, convinced of the consolidation of the Russian institutions, he extolled their recognition. Afterward, he denounced the Bolsheviks in inflammatory and emphatic language as enemies of civilization.

In the bourgeois sector, Lloyd George has a more European than British — or British, and therefore European — vision of the social war, of class struggle. His politics are inspired by the general interests of western capitalism, and he recommends the betterment of the tenor of life of European workers, at the expense of the colonial populations of Asia, Africa, etc. The social revolution is a phenomenon of capitalist civilization, of European civilization. The capitalist regime — in Lloyd George’s judgment — should stall the social revolution, distributing among the workers of Europe a chunk of the yields obtained from the rest of the world’s workers. It must extract from the Asian worker, the African, Australian or American worker the shillings necessary to augment the comfort and well-being of the European worker and weaken his desire for social justice. It must organize the exploitation of the colonial nations so that these may supply the raw materials to the capitalist nations and absorb the whole of their industrial production. Furthermore, Lloyd George feels no revulsion at any sacrifice of the conservative idea, or at any transaction with the revolutionary idea. While the reactionaries want to repress the revolution by force, the reformists want to deal and negotiate with it. They believe that it is not possible to asphyxiate or to smash it, but rather, to domesticate it.

Between the far left and the far right, between fascism and Bolshevism, there still exists a heterogeneous intermediary zone, psychologically and organically democratic and evolutionist, which aspires to an accord, a transaction between the conservative and revolutionary ideas. Lloyd George is one of the substantive leaders of this tepid political zone. Some attribute to him an intimate demagogic sentiment, and define him as a politician nostalgic for a revolutionary position. But this judgment is formulated based on superficial facets of Lloyd George’s personality. Lloyd George does not have the spiritual aptitude to be either a revolutionary or reactionary strongman. He lacks the fanaticism, he lacks dogmatism, he lacks passion. Lloyd George is a political relativist, and like every relativist, his attitude towards life is a little sunny, a little cynical, a little ironic and a little humoristic.