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Love the culture series! Communism..... In space!!! Though I'd say to anyone who hasn't read them yet to skip the first and come back to it. It's a great novel, but it smells like the 80's. Was my first read in the series and it turned me off to the rest of them until years later when I have the series another chance
IMHO, post-scarcity is really the only way communism works. And it's not true communism in the Culture; people still own things - artifacts, art, themselves. And it's also not communism in the Marxist sense, where the workers own the means of production, because there isn't a working class and production is largely automated. It's some sort of post-Communism thing we don't have a name for. Or, maybe we do, and I just don't know it?
I think your issue is that the Culture's economy is so often depicted from the perspective of humans. I have two guinea pigs, and from their perspective they are living in a post-scarcity world. Same for the humans of the culture. Their economy isnt really visible from a human scale.
Either way, Ian M Banks isn't really interested in the economics of his setting and spends much more effort detailing the politics of how such a setting works socially, which i should point out doesn't need a post-scarcity economy to create. I'm not sure if you noticed this, but the culture punishes criminals primarily through shunning. (Sure, there's also the slap drones, but I'm fairly certain that slap drones are a humane alternative to shunning.) The theory is that their laws are lax enough that the only real crimes left require actual malice to commit, and shunning serves two purposes:
You're right; AFAICR, the economy is only ever depicted from a human perspective. Either in contrast to external cultures, or just describing daily life. Your Guinea Pig example is quite apt: humans in The Culture really are just pampered pets; or, maybe more like working dogs, although ship remotes could probably do all the stuff Contact agents do.
Have you ever read The Golden Oecumene trilogy, by Wright? The last chapter, in particular, is what I'm thinking of.
I've only read one post-scarcity novel and that's Down And Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. I think it's his first novel.
I've heard of it, and I like Doctorow, but haven't read it. I'll put it in the list.