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Hydrogen Sonata is largely set in _another_ post-scarcity lower-case-c culture who still have money and property and stuff, apparently largely on a ceremonial b
by rsynnott 1y ago
Hydrogen Sonata is largely set in _another_ post-scarcity lower-case-c culture who still have money and property and stuff, apparently largely on a ceremonial basis; the Culture characters involved see this as pretty weird. The Culture is fairly explicitly socialist (in the sense that the means of production isn't owned by companies or individuals).
I'm fairly certain someone from another culture actually uses the _word_ socialist (rather sneeringly), to describe the Culture in one of the books. Possibly Veppers?
> Minds have the means of production, not the people.
This is... arguable (and kind of comes up in the books). However it certainly _wasn't_ the case for the early Culture (the Culture predates the capital-m Minds).
- ThrowawayR2 1y agoOh, interesting; I wasn't even aware that he'd written anything in the Culture universe after Look To Windward since there was such a long hiatus after that one. I'll have pick up his last few books. I still think there's a gap between individuals not having to exercise much self-restraint because nearly anything can be provided to them on demand at no cost because goods and services are too cheap to meter in the Culture and the real world where individuals have to exercise considerable self restraint to hold the means of production by the community and for the community. If the Culture is socialism, it's post-scarcity socialism, which is not a form which most people would recognize.