ABSTRACT
The modal scheme of want satisfaction in the USA and the rest of the industrialized world are bound up in the wage or salary job, the institutionalized production of goods, and the household as a unit of consumption. The communal transition is from a model of earning as much as possible for the practice of consumption to one of consuming as little as possible to reduce the need for alienated work. If people in communal groups are to successfully reject a job-consumption model of want satisfaction, they must open up alternative ways of construing the material grounding of social life. Three broad alternative models of want satisfaction - anarchism, socialism and communism - sketch the possibilities. Communism requires a degree of social integration unlikely in the pluralist, natural formation, certainly possible among worldly Utopians, and practically required among apocalyptic sectarian groups.
