During my few years of involvement with Jura Books and its own version of direct democracy, I was forced to think deeply (ouch, that hurts) on the roles and limits of tolerance to variety. Jura's decision making process is clearly very democratic, with meetings where members discuss matters of interest and try to reach consensus. When I first got involved, I was very impressed to see, for the first time in my life, self management in action. In the other hand, after participating on it for some time, I came to realise that the pressure to reach consensus when opinions diverge stalls some important decisions for months and months, and this had been one of the reasons some people get burnt out and ultimately drop out of the collective.

Jura is the second organisation I participate in, where there is a counscious aversion to censor or judge member's behaviour at all. The first one was a fanzine I used to publish along with friends during my freshman years at uni. Its policy was 'anything is publishable, no censorship at all is allowed'. The maximum intervention an editor would have would be limited to suggestions to make the text more readable, which could be refused by authors, and the actual layout of the pages.

We published quite some numbers of that fanzine, A4-size, 15-page long. We lost heaps of money. Basically, we bitterly came to realise no one at the uni was interested in reading about 'anything'. We didn't have a focus theme. And most importantly, people were not interested in buying a collection of texts with no quality assurance whatsoever. And what we originally thought would be a way to give voice to the students, who didn't have at the time a means to express their views, ended up being a political experience on how to make people loose their interest on politics.

Sure we are all against state censorship. We are all pro variety! But I think one distiction must be made between 'the state' and an anarchist collective. We are not actively preventing anyone to organise outside our collective. Why do we then owe anyone the right to excercise their freedom to be different than us in our tiny little collective, where decisions are already cumbersome due to the fact that many people are involved? The right to variety should also mean that people should have the right to associate freely. And associating freely means choosing with whom one wants to associate. I don't want to give up my right not to work with people I find are not contributing to our work. That's no freedom to me.

We should be more counscious about the quality of the people we let into our organising efforts, so we can do it well. The FAI did it, according to the interviews seen in the Living the Utopia doco on the Spanish Revolution. The CNT dit it too. We do it in our personal relationships. I don't think this constitutes opression. I think this constitutes choice.

It is OK if someone thinks I'm not good to join their collective. What I don't think it's OK is when someone wants to force me to participate in a collective I don't feel identified, or if they prevent me from building my own collective.