• Shared Purchasing -- Yah, I know; we all like our own set of stuff, and it's that ubiquitous gear that has kept consumer capitalism humming along for so long. But that's exactly the point. How much of our consumption is excessive, gratuitous, and ultimately unnecessary? How much stuff do we buy because our old stuff is shoddily made, or because it has gone out of fashion? How many services do we have to purchase on the open market simply because we don't have the time we used to have to do it for ourselves? We're into this self-reinforcing negative feedback loop, where we have to feel good and "confident" about buying too much crap, deluding ourselves that the resulting economic growth is its own reward, even though we know we're being wasteful. And how much of our stuff essentially sits idle and unused for huge portions of every day? Why should 25 families have to buy 25 separate sets of essentially the same stuff, when most of it sits around dormant? With a more collective social form, basic sets of tools, appliances, and other apparatus can be purchased centrally and shared. In the business world, companies attempt to improve efficiency by eliminating redundancies and leveraging assets across their organizational structures. Why shouldn't families utilize the same logic in their purchasing, eliminating the vast redundancies that make up the core of American hyper-consumption?
• Different Labor Ratios -- With reduced overall consumption in a collective context, the money that needs to be expended on everyday functions goes down drastically. This would free up labor hours for adults to do more functions in-house, as opposed to having to purchase everything in the marketplace. Day care, food production, property maintenance, financial matters -- these could all be done internally by community members. A kind of positive feedback loop is created, a reversal of the one mention in the bullet-point above. As more is moved in-house, even less money is needed for external purchases, freeing up more resources for internal demands. We could describe this as a household version of import substitution, the drive to become more self-reliant by reducing dependency on outside factors. 
• Self-Reliance and Self-Worth -- As unemployment continues its upward surge, how valuable would it be to find a way to use people's skills outside of the normal market mechanisms, as outlined above? In our current arrangements, the long-term unemployed become depressed, frustrated, despondent, and sometimes suicidal or homicidal. Self-dignity is intimately tied to the ability to get cash and purchase the appropriate set of stuff for one's family. In a more cooperative social form, there is a purposeful attempt to reduce participation in the outside labor market, to increase self-reliance by bringing functions in-house. Community members can thus feel valued without necessarily bringing outside cash to the table. Obviously, some kind of income-sharing would be necessary, but there are many mechanism for accomplishing this without resorting to hippie-style communism. In the months ahead, it will become painfully evident that the bubbles of the past few decades are not just financial problems. They were mechanisms for creating a faulty relationship between labor, consumption, and self-worth. In essence, the reckless free credit has allowed many kinds of work to become vastly overvalued. Now the market is shedding the bogus credit, the faux careers and excessive lifestyles that were created by that credit are evaporating, and they will not return. If we don't find a way to value people's time and labor in a collective context, we are likely in for a lot more Binghamton style shootings or worse, as career-based personalities disintegrate.
• Higher Quality Participation in the Free Market -- All of the above might give the impression that I am anti-free market. Far from it. The marketplace and its mechanisms of supply and demand are the very best way we have to allocate resources. Just look around, and you'll see the incredible power of the market in every product around you. We live our whole lives swimming in a sea of products and services, all provided by that wonderful invisible hand. No centralized government or other huge bureaucracy could come close to doing the voluminous heavy lifting of the market. But in our current arrangements, regular people are so atomized and helpless vis-a-vis the market that their choices are nowhere close to rational or sensible. Families rarely have the time or expertise to really examine their purchases for value, efficiency, and longevity. And with continuing social and economic decline, consumption becomes increasingly desperate and therapeutic, further detaching the market from rationality. In a more collective social form, however, the reduced overall consumption and the internal economies of scale allow for better research into purchasing practices. There could be community buyers, specialists overseeing the bulk of the purchasing. Again, businesses utilize expert buyers, so why shouldn't families and communities enact that same logic? Similarly, since many man-hours are drawn in-house to perform community functions, the selection of people who still work in the outside job market can be guided by rational, thought-out values. High-value and high-pay outside positions could be preserved, while other people, who might be working at a mall or fast-food joint, could be better utilized inside the community, teaching kids to read or learning how to fix engines. In short, a more collective social form could be a better shaper of the market itself -- as opposed to the current system, which is rife with waste, fraud, redundancy, and superfluity. Which brings us to...
• Going Greener -- Much of the present rage for all things green is highly delusional. Everyone is in a rush to replace every product and service with a more environmentally friendly alternative. But as Jim Kunstler is always reminding us, we're not going to preserve the contemporary suburban crap-scape in its current form, only with green stuff plugged in for older models. The basic structure of the whole thing is unsustainable and incredibly wasteful. And despite the Obama green jobs plan, regular people are just losing ground too fast to be able to afford more expensive green products. The 13% of the working-age populace that is now superfluous (if we include the bloated prison population) is not going to be able to retrain itself to become a vast army of windmill technicians and soy farmers. It's the overall pattern of consumption and production that is just too much for the planet to handle, no matter how green it becomes. A more collective social form, with its drastically-reduced consumption via internal economies of scale, is really the only mechanism that I can see for robustly and quickly leveraging economic contraction into a positive thing for the environment.
• Intergenerational Social Security -- One of the scariest things about the collapse of the American Algorithm is the precarious position of our seniors. The implosion of the stock market has decimated retirement accounts, swelling the ranks of the impoverished elderly. As the Baby Boomers continue to reach retirement age, the prospects for our elders are grim. It is hard to see how we will fund the health and housing needs of our parents and grandparents over the next couple decades, under current arrangements. But a more collective social form would be able to make space for intergenerational habitation. Seniors could live side-by-side with their children and grandchildren, and the larger social group could buffer relations for those who feel no greater terror than having to live with their parents as adults. Instead of being stuffed into rest homes and nursing facilities, seniors could continue to contribute directly to the functioning of the community, providing wisdom, knowledge, and long-term perspective. Children would see the elderly as vibrant and important, and deserving of respect. Communities could make it a priority to find a nurse or doctor to be a resident, to provide professional but intimate care when needed.  
• A True Home Base -- Much of our current anxiety, rage, depression, and uncertainty comes from simply having too small a home base from which to approach the wider world. What family doesn't feel overwhelmed, having to constantly make intelligent choices amidst a sea of expanding information (much of it bad), from matters as far afield as health care, gas mileage, caloric intake, global warming, and educational policy. Consumer capitalism feasts upon the helplessness, singularity, and ultimate ignorance of the consumer. No one can know everything about the vast array of products and services available, so there are mountains of overproduction, planned obsolescence, general low-quality, and manufactured, faux desires. The individual personality decays quickly in such a setting, as the consumer becomes a simple canvas for the commodities devoured. The attention span grows shorter, and the ability to dispassionately analyze complex issues collapses. Time becomes more scarce, and people are always in a rush, even though they find time to watch endless hours of television. And there can be no true exploration of meaningful social change in this context, since so much energy must be expended just to keep income flowing without interruption. People with no savings, who are living paycheck-to-paycheck (as about 40% of Americans now say they are), are never going to find the time and energy to make careful choices for bettering society. But the intentional community takes a deliberate stance against this disintegration of the personality. Again, leveraging the internal economies of scale creates a kind of social alchemy, where time and space is recaptured from outside, besieging forces. Freed up from having to earn enough cash to purchase and maintain a full suite of products and services for one's own small family, people within a more cooperative social form can breathe easier, and use their living patterns themselves to attack many problems at once.

The above sketch is just a rough description of some of the benefits of creating a more collective social form. Check out www.ic.org to get a fuller picture of the struggles, triumphs, and innovations of the Intentional Communities movement. These are some great pioneers who have been laying the groundwork for what (hopefully) lies ahead for the rest of us.