Commoning Reading Circle

The reading circle began in February 2025, at the point when the Foundry was moving from being run by a few people towards collective governance. The question behind it was practical rather than academic: if we are going to hold this place together, how do groups like ours actually work, and what have other people learned the hard way?

So we read one text a month and talk about it. No prior reading of theory is needed, and nobody is expected to have opinions ready.

How a circle works

We meet on the last Sunday of the month, from 14:00 to 15:30 CET, in person on site and online at the same time.

One person picks the text and hosts that month. The text is shared in advance so the session is for discussion, not for reading. Hosting rotates: it is the main way the circle stays plural rather than becoming one person's syllabus.

Sessions run in English, with translation whenever someone needs it. We originally announced the circle as bilingual English–Spanish, and learned quickly that translating a live discussion in both directions is harder than it sounds. Texts that exist in Spanish or Galician translation are welcome, and when a text has only one translation, that version becomes the base for everyone.

Some months we postpone. When only two or three people can make it, we would rather move the session than hold a thin one — the circle is meant to be a pleasure, not an obligation, and the people who cannot come are usually the ones who most wanted to.

What we have read

The Tyranny of Structurelessness — Jo Freeman

Our first session, February 2025, and still the text the circle returns to most often. Written out of the women's liberation movement of the early 1970s, Freeman's argument is that there is no such thing as a structureless group. When a group declines to define roles, rules and accountability, structure does not disappear — it goes informal, and informal structure is available only to those already close to the centre. Friendship becomes the qualification. Newcomers cannot see the rules, so they cannot contest them.

For an association moving from founder-led to collective, the essay is less a warning about hierarchy than about the hidden kind. Freely readable: https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

The Imaginary Crisis — Geoff Mulgan

Read as a counterweight. Mulgan's argument, written in April 2020 for UCL and Demos Helsinki, is that we have become fluent at imagining catastrophe and technology, and lost the ability to picture a better society thirty years out. He calls this a deficit of social imagination, and traces it to institutions — universities, parties, think tanks — that have quietly vacated the work of describing plausible futures. The promise of repairing it, he suggests, is that communities become protagonists in their own history rather than spectators.

The paper is free to download from Demos Helsinki: https://demoshelsinki.fi/publication/the-imaginary-crisis-and-how-we-might-quicken-social-and-public-imagination/

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network — Caroline Levine

Read in April 2025. Levine is a literary critic, and the book is about how forms — a boundary, a rhythm, a hierarchy, a network — travel between poems, prisons, timetables and institutions. Her useful move for us is that forms are not simply oppressive or liberating; each one affords certain things and blocks others, and they constantly collide. A weekly rhythm can defeat a hierarchy. A network can slip past a boundary.

Read next to Freeman, it reframes the governance question: not "structure or no structure", but which forms we are choosing and what each one makes possible. Published by Princeton University Press: https://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/i10392.pdf

Mountains of change: open cooperativism in rural Greece

A study of The High Mountains cooperative in the Tzoumerka mountains of Epirus, read in mid-2025. The cooperative works to repopulate mountain villages, and does it through a mix of things that are not supposed to belong together: community-supported mountain production, a support centre for people moving back, and Tzoumakers, an open-hardware workshop where members build their own small-scale farming tools with open designs.

The finding that matters for us is that initiatives like this rarely resolve into a pure model. They end up hybrids — partly market, partly cooperative, partly commons — and that hybridity is what lets them survive while staying deeply local and globally connected. The article is in the Journal of Rural Studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0743016725002037

The cooperative itself: https://incultum.eu/partners/the-high-mountains-cooperative/

Murky Waters – PAF

Read in August 2025, and the most directly useful text of the year. It is not a published essay but an internal proposal document from PAF, a large self-organised space in France, setting out how they intended to reorganise themselves.

Their argument runs against the grain of most collective-governance writing. Having tried a system of rotating task-groups, and before that a small continuous coordinating team, they proposed shifting from transparency towards what they called opacity: giving each other a mandate to take care of things, and checking in afterwards rather than agreeing everything in advance. The premise is that PAF is not built on formal equality between participants but on asymmetry — different people carry different amounts of responsibility, and decisional weight follows the responsibility actually taken and sustained over time. What they ask of each other instead of control is care and consistency.

The structure they proposed is memorable: a small group of fireflies holding continuous fields of responsibility and mandating each other; crocodiles on site each month keeping the house running; and birds, newer people working alongside them and learning how the place works.

Read against Freeman, it is productively uncomfortable. Freeman warns that informal structure hides power; PAF answers that formalising equality can hide how much work some people are actually doing, and that trust extended deliberately is not the same as structurelessness. Both are describing failure modes we can recognise here.

Threads that keep coming back

Reading a text a month for a year produces something a single book does not: the same three or four questions, arriving from different directions.

Informal power is still power. Freeman's point turns up in every practical discussion we have — who gets told about a decision, who happens to be in the kitchen when it is made, who has been here long enough to know the unwritten rules. Writing things down is not bureaucracy; it is what makes power contestable.

Structure is a choice among forms, not a yes-or-no. Levine gave us better vocabulary for arguments we were already having. Rotating hosts, a fixed monthly rhythm, an open invitation: each of these is a form doing work.

Hybrids are normal. Both the Greek cooperative and our own situation suggest that mixing market activity, cooperative ownership and commons practice is not a failure of purity but the ordinary shape of things that last.

Imagination is a practical capacity. Mulgan's argument lands differently in a place where the work is physical. Being able to describe what this land and this association could be in twenty years turns out to be a precondition for deciding what to do next season.

Other things the circle has shared

Not everything gets read as a session text. These circulate between meetings and often shape the discussion.

• Five axes of transition — Radical Ecological Democracy, on imagining alternatives for a post-pandemic future: https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/five-axes-of-transition-imagining-alternatives-for-the-post-pandemic-future/
• Articulating Crisis and Creating Radical Alternatives — a visual report from the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, which maps how movements around the world describe the crises they face and the alternatives they build: https://globaltapestryofalternatives.org/reports:articulating_visual:index
• Beyond Civilization: Navigating the Regenerative Turn Through Cosmo-Local Logics — on the idea that knowledge can be shared globally while production stays local: https://davidkish.substack.com/p/beyond-civilization-navigating-the
• What the world can learn from Uruguay as the global housing crisis deepens — on Uruguay's cooperative housing federations, mutual-aid construction and collective ownership of homes: https://theconversation.com/what-the-world-can-learn-from-uruguay-as-the-global-housing-crisis-deepens-258342
• Democracy in Debt: Sri Lanka Beyond the Headlines — a documentary by Beena Sarwar, screened online by Vikalp@Prithvi, on how a country came through political and economic collapse: https://youtu.be/Az2hu9lXlrU
• Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons — David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, the standing reference for most of what this circle discusses.

Host a circle

Any active member can host, and you do not need to be an expert on the text — hosting means choosing something, sending it round in good time, and starting the conversation.

Sessions are announced on the blog and in the association's channels. If you are reading this from outside the association and the topic is your kind of thing, get in touch — several of these texts arrived from people who found us rather than the other way round.