An interesting experiment in publishing

How often have you wished for publishers to issue stories with more quality? Of course when we talk about quality this is inevitably subjective, so in the end what it comes down to is wanting more stories we like. Unfortunately, not all of us are editors, nor could we be. Editing is difficult, expensive and necessarily specialized work… or is it?

There’s something to be said for job specialisation: in many respects it has been the key factor in the increase of labour output, or certainly one of them. To people like Heinlein, who say specialisation is for insects, I reply that it’s no coincidence insects are such incredibly successful organisms. Nonetheless, there are many things that once upon a time required specialised knowledge, and which have become commonplace: reading and writing are the obvious examples. So is there a chance that publishing fiction could be one of those cases too?

This is one of those questions that requires an experimental answer. No deductions from first principles here. Fortunately, the attempt has been done, so it’s possible to give a reasonably reality-grounded answer, and the answer is yes, with reservations.

The experiment involved setting up a website and an e-mail address to receive submissions, as well as a request for stories under specific terms. Not incredibly favourable commercial terms, but as it happens sufficiently favourable to obtain more than enough stories of good quality. Of course, it’s in the nature of publishing–and that’s what this was, even if unorthodox–that one must be able to advance the money. It’s therefore not exactly a risk-free venture.

Aside from the interesting verification of the claim that it is possible–though commercially difficult, perhaps not yet viable–to become a publisher by advancing some money, using print on demand and so on, the experiment had also another object, which is rather interesting in itself:

Even if you don’t like all the stories in Thoughtcrime Experiments, I hope you’ll agree that they’re of similar quality to the stories you see in big-name print magazines. The “experiment” behind Thoughtcrime Experiments was to verify the existence of such stories floating around in editors’ slush piles. To get a firsthand look it was necessary to become editors.

It turns out that indeed there is an oversupply of stories, not only with respect to readers, but also with respect to editors.

It’s well known that there’s an oversupply of stories relative to readers. That’s why rates are so low. Our experiment shows that there’s an oversupply of stories relative to editors. By picking up this anthology you’ve done what you can to change the balance of readers to stories. I wrote this appendix to show that you’ve also got the power to change the balance of editors to stories.

Of course something being possible doesn’t make it necessarily easy. In this case, I suspect the experience takes enough money and time that it won’t be very widely replicated, for now. It makes one think though: if indeed stories are oversupplied with respect to readers, how come people keep, in one way or another, paying for them? The argument that people pay for consistently good stories isn’t sufficient, since the experiment shows–to the extent this sample size can–that consistently good stories are oversupplied as well.

Perhaps the essential reason is readers do not have the energy to search for the consistently good stories. This requires, of necessity, an editor role. An editor role must invest time and money in separating good from bad stories, but, more to the point, because an editor role must invest time and money, it won’t be possible to publish all the good stories. A form of artificial scarcity–beyond the copyright question itself–must be created in order to support the infrastructure of publishing and editing.

So this is yet another way in which the commodity form and its imperatives shape our life, in this case our culture, by reducing the potential amount of value. Nothing new, I suppose, but an interesting application of the principle.

Honduras and Iran

I find it interesting to consider how differently these two situations are treated, both by the mainstream media and the mainstream currents of opinion.

I’m not saying they should be treated identically–there are important differences to be considered, after all–but the reasons why they are seem to be political, and not necessarily good.

So I’m going to focus on the similarities for a bit, just as a counterpoise.

• Both countries are under threat of force by their own armed forces.
• Both countries have seen their liberties curtailed.
• Both states are using pretexts that are widely questioned by the people.

Force against protests has taken place in both countries. Aside from the actions of the military against Zelaya, the military and police have attempted to disband the robust and massive demonstrations whereby the people have asked for a resumption of democratic processes, free from arbitrary military interference. More to the point, the people of Honduras have demonstrated in favour of their ousted president, defying the military and police, the political establishment, the rogue institutions (Congress and the Supreme Court) as well as the disinformation put forward by much of the press. Likewise, in Iran, the people have quite unambiguously demonstrated, if not against the Islamic Republic as such, certainly against abuses and mismanagement by Ahmadinejad’s government. In both cases there have been protests supportive of the establishment, the de facto power. These protests are hardly noticed when they happen in Iran; but when they happen in Honduras, the right wing in the imperialist countries amplifies them as an example of people fighting to keep their constitution alive. On the other side of the isle, I’ve often read and heard leftists minimising the protests in Iran, calling them shills for imperialism, suggesting they are paid-for agents of the CIA through the National Endowment for Democracy and similar funding instruments. Although it’s undeniable that there is funding for “dissident groups” in Iran, it is also becoming increasingly difficult to ignore that the protests taking place there are real, and the real outgrowth of a popular mobilisation, against real shortcomings of the Islamic republic–the electoral fraud being in many respects a mere pretext. Incidentally, it is also rather likely that the military of Honduras, which was trained and receives technical advice from the US, wouldn’t go ahead with an operation like this without engaging in any sort of consultation. Whatever the case may be, though, it’s very hard to find out, and the US, after some hesitance, seems to have opposed the coup this time (unlike the one in Venezuela in 2002).

With respect to the limitations of liberties, in both cases the state acted in relatively similar ways. It seems a well-developed playbook for the repression of popular mass action. The press was directly or indirectly taken over and forbidden to report on the issues. Telecommunications were cut or intervened. Electricity seems to have been cut as well. Controls on the movement of people. Repression of the protests that resulted. From what we know at this point, the repression which took place in Iran was more brutal than that in Honduras. I hope that the armed forces and the police will at least not engage in further attacks against peaceful protests, but I fear things have not run their course yet.

The pretexts under which the state has intervened to curtail people’s freedom and threaten them with force are on both cases widely disbelieved by the people. I don’t know whether there was electoral fraud in Iran, although I think that is rather likely. If there was, I don’t know whether it was substantive enough to change the electoral results. What appears clear though, is that people in Iran widely doubt the transparency and honesty of their electoral process, but, more to the point, the protests are only tangentially about whether a particular fact or not is true–whether there was fraud–and seem to be an indictment, if not of the Islamic Republic as a whole, of the direction it has been going under Ahmadinejad’s government and the Supreme Leader’s direction. In Honduras, the questions of fact are rather simpler to sort out, and here is where one of the fundamental differences lies: we know that there was a coup in Honduras, we suspect that there was electoral fraud in Iran.

I have already heard calls for a war against the Islamic Republic. These calls come from the usual suspects: neoconservatives, in the main. They want to repeat the humanitarian intervention manoeuvre that they tried in Iraq: have to cluster bomb the brave and freedom-loving Iranian people to save it from its own State. Aside from the plausibility that an imperialist coalition could be put together at this juncture to invade the Islamic Republic, these calls are curiously absent in the context of Honduras. Somehow, the interventionists and advocates of humanitarian intervention are silent about this other case, when not explicitly and violently opposed to any kind of intervention in the inner affairs of Honduras. Of course, they realize that such an intervention, which in any event I don’t think too plausible either, would come delivered by ALBA, or a similar coalition, so it would not be followed by colonial military administration with the concomitant imposition of the free market blueprint. While neoconservatives do not speak up for the rights of Hondurans, their preoccupation for the rights of Iranians–the same ones that they would like to cluster bomb–will sound particularly hollow to my ears.

Honduras: frequently unasked questions that should be asked

Inevitably I must go back to the topic of Honduras. In spite of trying to dispel much of the disinformation floating about, people are still making the same incorrect claims. Obama is now being accused of being a commie! If we should be so lucky!

Here is an excellent article (in Spanish) on the coup that does a very good job of explaining the situation, but perhaps what’s needed is more of an FAQ, though I’m not calling it an FAQ because the questions that need asking aren’t actually being frequently asked. So here’s a little FUQ on the situation in Honduras (you work out if the pun was intended).

Didn’t Zelaya break the law when calling the referendum to extend term limits? Zelaya didn’t call a referendum. Zelaya didn’t call a consultation to extend term limits. Zelaya called a non-binding popular consultation, essentially a poll, to find out what people thought of the idea of calling for a constituent assembly on the upcoming elections in November.

Right, but wasn’t Zelaya’s term over when the army acted because he wanted to keep in power? No, Zelaya’s term ends at the end of this year. In November there will be elections in Honduras, which will elect a new president. The candidate list is already final. Zelaya is not on it. I must make this point again, because people seem to have some problems digesting it: the candidate list for the upcoming November elections in Honduras is already final, Zelaya is not on it.

OK, but the Constitution forbids an attempt to increase term limits: isn’t this what Zelaya was implicitly doing? No. Let me go over this once more, slowly:

• Zelaya did not call for a referendum.
• The non-binding consultation did not refer to term limits.
• Whatever would have been the result, Zelaya would stop being president at the end of his term.

OK, but a new constitution could have increased term limits, couldn’t it? Yes–and then again, it could not. The whole point is that a new constitution would be a new constitution. By definition, it would be outside the constitutional purview of the currently existing instrument. If it would have increased term limits, this would be a result of the constituting power of the sovereign people of Honduras democratically expressed in a constituent assembly. Whatever the case would be, though, Zelaya would not directly benefit from it, certainly not these upcoming elections: the constituent assembly would have taken place after the elections, when Zelaya would have stopped being president of Honduras.

Right, but doesn’t article 239 forbid the breach or modification, or direct or indirect support thereof, of the provision that sets presidential term limits? Yes, it does. It is extremely far-fetched though, to believe that this provision is breached or modified by the non-binding consultation on whether to call a constituent assembly. The following could have happened:

• The people could have said no.
• The people could have said yes, but the assembly not be convened (Remember? Non-binding)
• The assembly could have been convened and no agreement could have been reached on a new Constitution.
• An agreement on a new Constitution could have been reached, and the people not have approved it.
• The people could have approved the new Constitution, which could contain the same term limits.

Holding that all these contingencies can be ignored and that the popular consultation itself breaches article 239 is utterly laughable, and, not to put too fine a point on it, completely lacking in any basis in law. If we’re going to do a reductio ad absurdum, why not say running for elections breaches this disposition? After all the president of the republic is the one with the power to propose the popular consultation, placing themselves in the position to breach term limits! Yeah, right. The verbs on the article are clear: to breach (not done) and to propose its reform (not done). End of story. A weak argument could be made that if the constituent assembly had been convened, people proposing the removal of term limits may be breaching this article. It’s a weak argument for several reasons, chief of it being that no constituting power can bind the future with its will. If a constituent assembly were chosen by the people of Honduras and then through referendum the people would have chosen to rule itself under a new Constitution, the constituting power from 1982 has nothing to say about that. No person can, even willfully, enter slavery, nor nation can be hostage of a Constitution: the people of Honduras is the full sovereign subject who can, if it so wishes, abolish this arrangement and institute a new one.

OK, but didn’t Zelaya breach the law, at least, when going against the Supreme Court’s writ? Maybe. This is a difficult question I don’t pretend to have a definite answer for. I do have a definite answer for some other issues that should be considered in reference to this question. The popular consultation law had never been decreed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Disobedience by the military to the president of the republic–whose chain of command terminates–is certainly contrary to law. The president can dismiss military leaders who disobey orders, contrary to the Supreme Court’s claim. There is no provision in the Constitution or the laws for the president to be kidnapped and exiled by the military, completely without due process.

OK, so you say what the military did was not legal, how should they have gotten rid of a president who broke the laws? Zelaya probably didn’t break the laws, but let’s assume for a second that he did. The proper procedure in this case would be impeachment by the National Congress. Let’s recapitulate what actually happened: the president was kidnapped through force of arms, put into a plane, and flown abroad by the military; a resignation letter was forged, and the president of Congress assumed the presidence of the republic.

Perhaps the president’s exile was illegal, but didn’t the president of Congress have the right to assume power now? No. Congress should have impeached, for which there are also some laws to follow, and which conditions are in all likelihood not satisfied. Instead, Congress contradicts itself, claiming on the one hand the separation of the president from his powers due to breach of article 239, and on the other hand the substitution by the president of Congress on the basis of that ludicrous ploy, the resignation letter. Be honest here: does it look to you like Zelaya really did resign?

OK, but now that Zelaya is abroad, isn’t the right thing to let the people of Honduras sort their own future out? Sure, and they are trying to do that, through protests, civil disobedience against the illegal de facto regime, and so on. The people of Honduras want their constitution restored and their legitimate president reinstalled. At least this is the feeling I get from most sources. Incidentally, they’re acting legally on the basis of article 3 of their Constitution, a rather elegant expression of the people’s legitimate right of resistance against naked force and lawlessness.

But if Zelaya is reinstalled, communism will spread over the world, Chávez/the terrorists will win and America fwill lose a vital partner and a friend who protects its interests in Central America, won’t it? That’s bad, isn’t it? To the first, all I can say is the same I’ve said about Obama: if we should be so lucky! To the second, bad for who: the US? Perhaps, in which case maybe it should consider stop giving implicit (or even explicit) backing to military coups in Latin America. For the people of Honduras? It doesn’t look that way to me, but, more to the point, it doesn’t look that way to them: it’s their country, it’s their call. In any event, in November they will be able to make these choices through democratic elections. So let the sovereign people decide!

Madoff: a socialist perspective.

So I’m glad to see the WSWS, a news source I respect as much as I may have certain ideological differences, analyses the Madoff spectacle on a very similar manner to that which I propose. Because they are not sitting an administrative law exam tomorrow and they are better at this whole journalism thing, they have a lot more concrete and unarguable basis to ground their article on:

While acknowledging that Madoff’s decision to plead guilty and cooperate with investigators seeking to unravel his schemes would ordinarily count in his favor, Chin underscored the political reasons for imposing the maximum sentence possible under the law. Madoff’s fraud had left his victims “doubting our financial institutions” as well as “our government’s ability to regulate,” he said.

So here we have it from the judge himself: the essential evil in Madoff’s actions–from the viewpoint of the ruling class–lies not on the swindle qua swindle (where do profits come from?) but on the mismanagement of the swindle, which has scared the marks, alarmed the cattle, frightened the prey… etc. The unacceptable sin of a bourgeois is the destruction of a very carefully cultivated state of appearance, which hides the reality of class exploitation behind a façade of reward for effort, free agents, and just and equal exchange of value for value. When these pillars of the bourgeois edifice are seen to shake under violations as deep and blatant as Madoff’s scheme, the working classes, whose labour is the source of all use values but those with which nature itself selflessly provides us, can see the reality hidden behind the screens: exploitation, subjection, alienation, and, in summary, the eternal swindle of surplus value extraction.

I’m not simply being hyperbolic when I speak of the systematic and necessary swindle entailed by capitalism. If you don’t want to believe in the greater–profits–at least consider the lesser, and realize Madoff is not the rare aberration which the press is attempting to depict, in the manner of a scapegoat, to burden with Wall Street’s crimes entire. Consider this:

At least a half dozen big hedge funds and private investors had close relations with Madoff, and seem to have had advance notice of his collapse—the bankruptcy trustee is now suing them for making more than $10 billion in withdrawals in the months before December 2008.

So while the press have their feeding frenzy at the expense of their chosen villain of the week, remember that Madoff’s more successful homologues have engaged in a great redistribution of wealth–from the bottom to the top–under the unquestionable guise of profits and financialization. In the meantime, the holders of political power get elected on a hazy platform of change and immediately proceed to bail these operators out, but, after all, they paid for the campaign. While we workers keep our illusions, both in the pillars of a building ever more subject to shaking and quaking, from the misdesign and inner tension instituted by the blind architect which was history, and in the political power which is all too often counterpoised to that economic edifice, while in reality it functions but as buttress of it, we’ll continue getting swindled, and, from time to time, we will wonder: does it have to be like this?

Madoff’s punishment and other forms of theatre

Recently on German Joys, I’ve read a post about the sentencing of Madoff which has made me think a bit about the whole judicial system, in particular when applied to what in effect are criminal celebrities like Madoff, as a sort of spectacle, a mechanism with similar uses than the classics have been said to attribute to tragedy.

Madoff’s biggest crime, if it can be called a crime, is that he got caught. He put in question, in a public and embarrassing way, that this whole setup we live under is but a big swindle, a swindle which dimensions would dwarf the abilities of any man to construct. All too often we here about Madoff’s “victims”. Madoff’s victims were gamblers who chose to believe in the promises of a swindler, but in a way that implicates them too. What did they think Madoff was doing with their money? In the best cases, being the most charitable we may be without breaking with reality, they didn’t know and didn’t want to think about it too deeply, but educated people–and Madoff’s investors weren’t exactly paupers–know the only big machine for making free lunches is the capitalist system itself and its dynamic of exploitation of labour and nature. It’s unthinkable that they could have believed Madoff was not a swindler: they just thought he was swindling someone else.

As the Spanish idiom says, ladrón que roba a ladrón tiene cien años de perdón: a thief who steals from a thief has 100 years of pardons. Of course this idiom itself is little more than a nice turn of phrase, but it clearly encapsulates an intuition: that there is something, if not virtuous, at least not depraved in utilizing people’s avarice, greed, and complete unwillingness to think–especially when such thoughts may disturb the miracle, the chance of getting something for nothing–to one’s own benefit.

I don’t think of Madoff as a hero. In the best of cases, he managed to reallocate ill-gotten gains from one place to another. His punishment, though, is not so much derived from some notion of fairness or moral uprightness that was broken by his conduct–which is otherwise frequent enough–but rather from the embarrassing fact the swindler got caught. The bourgeois see one of their number fumble a task on which their livelihood as people and as a class depends, and can’t but unsheathe their knives. Don’t they do this every day to labour without any fuss? Why did this clumsy man have to call attention to the fact that, comes down to it, capitalism is the biggest swindle in history?

On Honduras: don’t buy the bullshit

There is a certain strain of thought that holds that, although the situation in Honduras is clearly regrettable, there is some sort of moral equivalence, or equal justice, or something to that effect, on both sides of the equation. Let us remind ourselves what both sides are: on the one hand, the legally constituted government, elected by popular vote; on the other, special bodies of armed men, and the unelected and reactionary Supreme Court.

This position, that may at first appear even handed and wise, is nothing more than the smoke under which the latest outrages of imperialism and militarism have hidden under, in order to better achieve their ends, which are essentially the subjugation of the world to the dictates of the free market capitalism and the decoupling of the economy from centres of political decision that could ever be subject to pressure by the people themselves. This manoeuvre isn’t new, but what is new is the success it has had. Almost anyone who talks about the situation in Honduras, thinks of it in terms of a president who tried to unlawfully extend his term of office. Even people sympathetic to Zelaya are willing to grant that he had called for a referendum in order to extend term limits so he could be re-elected again.

Because this is something that has taken place in other countries, like Venezuela, where Chávez–who is probably the most democratic politician on the planet at least in terms of deriving his support directly from popular will–sought and obtained popular support for re-election through constitutional change, the position is at least plausible, and I believed it at first. This article, however, does an excellent job at dispelling some of those myths, and I shall limit myself to a couple of judicious quotations. The rest, if you want to, is for you to find out:

…this is far from what President Zelaya attempted to do in Honduras the past Sunday and which the Honduran political/military elites disliked so much. President Zelaya intended to perform a non-binding public consultation, about the conformation of an elected National Constituent Assembly. To do this, he invoked article 5 of the Honduran “Civil Participation Act” of 2006. According to this act, all public functionaries can perform non-binding public consultations to inquire what the population thinks about policy measures. This act was approved by the National Congress and it was not contested by the Supreme Court of Justice, when it was published in the Official Paper of 2006. That is, until the president of the republic employed it in a manner that was not amicable to the interests of the members of these institutions.

Here we clearly notice how the actions of the president, which are universally being portrayed as seeking an illegal and unconstitutional extension of his term, or at best the ability to be re-elected, are merely seeking a public consultation–non-binding at that–in order to ascertain whether the Honduran people–the sovereign subject of this play, and not any bourgeois notion of rule of law or constituted power–desire to modify the manner in which they rule themselves. A matter which, I am sure, no convinced advocate of human rights can dispute is within their province alone. But there is more:

…the objective was not to extend Zelaya’s term in office. In this sense, it is important to point out that Zelaya’s term concludes in January 2010. In line with article 239 of the Honduran Constitution of 1982, Zelaya is not participating in the presidential elections of November 2009, meaning that he could have not been reelected. Moreover, it is completely uncertain what the probable National Constituent Assembly would have suggested concerning matters of presidential periods and re-elections. These suggestions would have to be approved by all Hondurans and this would have happened at a time when Zelaya would have concluded his term. Likewise, even if the Honduran public had decided that earlier presidents could become presidential candidates again, this disposition would form a part of a completely new constitution. Therefore, it cannot be regarded as an amendment to the 1982 Constitution and it would not be in violation of articles 5, 239 and 374. The National Constituent Assembly, with a mandate from the people, would derogate the previous constitution before approving the new one. The people, not president Zelaya, who by that time would be ex-president Zelaya, would decide.

So even assuming that Zelaya indeed had been seeking, under the guise of this consultation, a way to become elected president again, this is not something that would have immediate applicability, and which would in any case be a matter to resolve by the hypothetical newly constituted power that might have resulted from the constitutional assembly. Smoke and mirrors, comrades! Don’t buy the bullshit!

Some more metastuff.

Ok, so what have I been doing all this time?

Mostly the things I had to do: go to class, Pretend I was interested in law, that sort of stuff. I’ve tried to follow what’s been going on in the world, for which www.marxmail.org has been an invaluable resource. Aside from that type of thing, I’ve been reading quite a lot.

One thing I haven’t been doing enough of is writing: neither here nor elsewhere have I written much for quite a few months now.

Previously I had been using a weblog client to post here, called W.Blogger. While I’ve nothing bad to say about it per se, there was some sort of bug–not sure if just on my machine or something more general–that tended to make it crash periodically. This, needless to say, could be described as less than ideal. I’ve however found a good substitute tool now, which is the one I’m using to write this. Because it makes it very simple to use tags, and not at all simple to use categories, I suspect my posts hereafter will be uncategorized. Such is life.

Anyway, now I can quickly write a post and get it published on the weblog without having to fight with the ever more ingenious mechanisms which web designers create to make accessibility harder and as I have almost finished this course (one exam left, on Friday, on Administrative law) it’s my hope that I will be writing more and more often in here. At least that’s my intention, though I won’t promise!

Why the Spanish Constitution series was doomed from the start

Well, just think about it. A series on the legal analysis of the Spanish Constitution, on an English-speaking weblog? This was well and truly doomed from the start.

 

Thinking back, what I must wonder about is why I thought it was a good idea at the time. My first guess–this was a while ago–is that I was somehow hoping to establish myself as a commentator on Spanish legal topics… in English. Yes, I’m not sure why either.

 

In any event, given this weblog doesn’t seem to generate any actual readership (probably a result of me having semi-abandoned it and not choosing my topics wisely) I’m probably going to use it as a place to write–less systematically–about anything that comes to mind.

Test

I am testing a weblog client. I’m not very sure how well or badly it will work, but it’s worth giving it a shot. It may be a bit of an exageration but the lack of good tools has at least contributed to me not getting much written in here of late.

The Spanish Constitution, a series.

Today it’s the 5th of December of 2008. Tomorrow it will be the 30th anniversary of the Spanish Constitution’s referendum, which set an end to four decades of dictatorship and arbitrary rule. In its infancy, during the so-called “transition”, a political consensus existed not to criticize it in any way, since it was the only attainable compromise and therefore the best possible Constitution. Whatever the virtues of that approach, and notwithstanding a modern tendency to do the same on grounds that are completely vacuous today, the Constitution (hereafter CE78) is almost 30 now. In the line (but far from the spirit) of the unfortunate remarks of Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, speaker for the Aznar government (1996–98) and Secretary of State of Communications, who, in 1996 (18th anniversary of CE78) had the temerity to say that “la Constitución ha cumplido 18 años: si fuera un hombre podría votar y si fuera mujer se vestiría de largo” (The Constitution is 18 years old: if it were a man it could vote, and if it were a woman it would have her coming-out party), we can say that as a robust 30-year-old, protected by the whole apparatus of the State, the Constitution no longer needs that careful sensitivity towards it which it enjoyed with more justification when it was only a suckling infant. Certain “ayatollahs of the Constitution” aside, the CE78 did not come to the world dictated by divine providence, does not pre-exist nor is it preeminent over the will of the people of the Spanish state, and is, in sum, a contingent historical result, not a blueprint for utopia which cannot be abrogated or modified. With this I do not imply that I consider CE78 of no value, but, simply, I do not (nor can any thinking person) consider it a perfect text, either. For this reason and making use of the occasion, I’m going to write a series of articles about CE78, laying out a critical analysis of it. Since today is the day before the anniversary, I shall start by going over the preamble.

In terms of method, I will start by quoting the text (which we must let speak for itself) followed by the English translation to be found at Wikisource, except where I should have to make changes if I consider the translation in any way inadequate to clarify some aspect.

Don Juan Carlos I, Rey de España. A todos los que la presente vieren y entendieren,
Sabed: Que las Cortes han aprobado y el Pueblo Español ratificado la siguiente Constitución:

Preámbulo

La Nación española, deseando establecer la justicia, la libertad y la seguridad y promover el bien de cuantos la integran, en uso de su soberanía, proclama su voluntad de:
Garantizar la convivencia democrática dentro de la Constitución y de las leyes conforme a un orden económico y social justo.
Consolidar un Estado de Derecho que asegure el imperio de la ley como expresión de la voluntad popular.
Proteger a todos los españoles y pueblos de España en el ejercicio de los derechos humanos, sus culturas y tradiciones, lenguas e instituciones.
Promover el progreso de la cultura y de la economía para asegurar a todos una digna calidad de vida.
Establecer una sociedad democrática avanzada, y
Colaborar en el fortalecimiento de unas relaciones pacíficas y de eficaz cooperación entre todos los pueblos de la Tierra.

En consecuencia, las Cortes aprueban y el Pueblo español ratifica la siguiente
CONSTITUCIÓN.

Translation:

We, don Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, announce to all those who may have knowledge of this: that the Cortes have passed and the Spanish people have ratified the following Constitution:

Preamble

The Spanish Nation, desiring to establish justice, liberty, and security, and to promote the well-being of all its members, in the exercise of its sovereignty,
proclaims its will to:
Guarantee democratic coexistence within the Constitution and the laws, in accordance with a fair economic and social order.
Consolidate a State of Law which ensures the rule of law as the expression of the popular will.
Protect all Spaniards and peoples of Spain in the exercise of human rights, of their culture and traditions, languages and institutions.
Promote the progress of culture and of the economy to ensure a dignified quality of life for all.
Establish an advanced democratic society, and
Cooperate in the strengthening of peaceful relations and effective cooperation among all the peoples of the earth.

Therefore, the Cortes pass and the Spanish people ratifies the following .
Spanish Constitution of 1978.

Relevance of the preamble. Although it is true that the preamble is considered, as the expositions of motives in Spanish laws, to be non-binding, and not a part of the text as such, it is no less true that it has a certain symbolic importance, more so when it is the preamble of a text that, as a Constitution must, is not only juridical but also political in nature. It could be argued whether the preamble can be used in order to integrate the text, in order to determine the reasoning of the drafters. I’d say the preamble isn’t much use for that, given the level of abstraction.

Source and addressee. We must start at the beginning, but considering the CE78, like any other instance of communication, must have more than 0 senders and more than 0 receivers. What first strikes me about the document, is the clarity with which it lays out who is the source of this norm and who are its recipients. The source is the King, and the recipients are indetermined (the whole world, one supposes): We, don Juan Carlos I, King of Spain, announce to all those who may have knowledge of this… Although the grounding of the norm is in the Cortes and the People’s ratification, it’s no less true that the norm emanates from the king. This is a bad beginning: we’re not in the 18th century anymore, and the king is not a source of sovereignty. When it comes to issuing the grundnorm for a State, it should be issued by the only subject which has the power to issue it: the people. Otherwise, an unacceptable preeminence is given to the king, as though the legitimacy of his rule preexisted the popular will, instead of the other way round. It is true that this is a traditional style clause of Spanish law, but sometimes tradition must be set aside. Consider the Constitution of the Second Republic. It uses a much better clause: España, en uso de su soberanía, y representada por las Cortes Constituyentes, decreta y sanciona esta Constitución. Spain, in use of its sovereignty, and represented by the Constitutional Assemblies, decrees and sanctions this Constitution.

Grounding. We can find the grounding for the Constitution on the same clause, as well as several clauses of the preamble. The grounding is, clearly, the approval of the text by the Cortes and the ratification by the Spanish people. This is a perfectly good grounding. Another matter is the seat of sovereignty. In the Second Republic’s Constitution the sovereignty is attributed to Spain, without further qualifications, whereas in the CE78 it is attributed to the Spanish Nation. I consider either choice unfortunate, preferring to refer simply to the Spanish people, or the people in Spain, or a formulation to that effect, but I would prefer the CE31 to CE78 formula, because it does not attempt to define the Spanish Nation as a preexisting reality to the norm. The idea of Spanish Nation and of an unalienable State territory does appear, but it does so in the norm, where it belongs, and not outside it.

Teleology. The preamble, following a traditional and well-known style in Spanish law, serves as an exposition of motives. There’s not much to say against those, except that they are not well developed throughout the text. For instance, the last recital which speaks of peaceful relations and cooperation could be soundly backed by an article like article 6 of the CE31, which read: Spain renounces war as an instrument of national policy. Same thing for a just economic order, and so on.

Here ends the first part of this series. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything.