Delany, Samuel R. Trouble on Triton: An Ambiguous Heterotopia (1976).
Many utopias, particularly the 'classic' utopias that flourished in the late nineteenth century, use the device of a visitor to expedite exposition. The fish-out-of-water character can mention things that to the inhabitants of utopia are too obvious ever to mention. Then the visitor can listen, bewildered and amazed, to lengthy explanations. Bron in Delany's Trouble on Triton is a bit of an outsider: from Mars, and not entirely comfortable in Triton society.
Trouble on Triton is somewhat unusual in imagining a relatively strong and pervasive state along with greater social, economic, and political freedoms, both formal and substantive. Triton is an unusual democracy: everyone is governed by the candidate they vote for. Living arrangements are various and often communal. Society appears fairly heavily surveilled, although it may be that the majority of the data is never used. Delany also imagines an intellectual discipline, ‘metalogic,’ which expands the realm of the calculable; a metalogician is likely to work in something called a ‘computer hegemony.’
There are some indications that money may have been abolished (outside of a pretentious restaurant or two, where it is used as an archaic affectation), but whether this is really the case depends on how you interpret the credit system, and its relationship with the welfare state:
Second, because credit on basic food, basic shelter, and limited transport is automatic—if you don’t have labor credit, your tokens automatically and immediately put it on the state bill—we don’t support the huge, social service organizations of investigators, interviewers, office organizers, and administrators that are the main expense of your various welfare services here. [...] Our very efficient system costs one-tenth per person to support as your cheapest, national, inefficient and totally inadequate system here. Our only costs for housing and feeding a person on welfare is the cost of the food and rent itself, which is kept track of against the state’s credit by the same computer system that keeps track of everyone else’s purchases against his or her own labor credit. In the Satellites, it actually costs minimally less to feed and house a person on welfare than it does to feed and house someone living at the same credit standard who’s working, because the bookkeeping is minimally less complicated. Here, with all the hidden charges, it costs from three to ten times more. Also, we have a far higher rotation of people on welfare than Luna has, or either of the sovereign worlds. Our welfare isn’t a social class who are born on it, live on it, and die on it, reproducing half the next welfare generation along the way. Practically everyone spends some time on it. And hardly anyone more than a few years. Our people on welfare live in the same co-ops as everyone else, not separate, economic ghettos. Practically nobody’s going to have children while they’re on it. The whole thing has such a different social value, weaves into the fabric of our society in such a different way, is essentially such a different process, you can’t really call it the same thing as you have here.
The gist of it seems to be: basic universal services (food, shelter, transport) on a UBI-like system, plus the opportunity to earn more credits by working for non-essential purchases. But the details are ambiguous and intriguing. It sounds like if you were to buy some groceries, with labour credit in your account, that's what would be depleted; if you haven't got enough, then instead the state pays for the groceries. There would be a curious incentive structure: don't buy essentials when your labour credit balance is low. Then there are these "tokens" denominated in franqs:
He was putting his card back into his purse when something clinked: his two-franq token had fallen into the return cup, reiterating what the booth itself had been placed there to proclaim: The government cared.
He forefingered up the token (with the machine broken, he would not know if the two franqs had or had not been charged against his labor credit till he got to his co-op computer) and fisted aside the curtain.
And:
Mumblers with flickering lips and tight-closed lids swung grubby plastic begging-bowls—too fast, really, to drop anything in. As they passed, he noted a set of ancient keys in one, in another a Protyyn bar (wrapper torn), and a five-franq token. (“Use this till I report it stolen, or the bill gets too big,” had been someone’s mocking exhortation.)
And:
“That’s right.” And the redhead began to talk animatedly about something else, till they reached the transport. “Oh, and may I ask you a mildly embarrassing favor: Could you pay my fare with one of your to— kens. It’s only half a franq on your credit; I know it seems silly but—”
“Oh, sure,” Bron said, opening his purse and fingering around for his half-franq token. He pushed the coin-shape into one of the change slots beside the entrance. (There was still some leftover money; but Sam seemed to have forgotten about it.) The green light flashed, and the token rolled out again into Bron’s palm.
“Thank you,” the redhead said, and walked through the gate. Bron put the token in again; the light flashed again; again the token was returned (and somewhere two fares were billed against his labor credits on some highly surveyed government tape); returning the token to his purse, he followed the redhead onto the transport platform, constructing schemes of paranoid complexity about why the redhead might not want his presence in the city known. After all, basic transportation was a nonrefusable (what the dumb earthies would call “welfare”) credit service.
Are tokens always 'returned,' so that they're really something like lots of little contactless debit cards? If something costs ten franqs, can you use the same one-franq token over and over again to buy it? One of the main features of cash is its relative anyonymity, so cash linked to government databases is a curious hybrid. Yet this wouldn't necessarily be silly: we could speculate around the advantages of preserving some of the materiality of cash. For example, losing a two-franq token would have different implications to losing a fifty-franq token (or a debit card).
Or does the returning have something to do with the nonrefusability of basic services? Do tokens sometimes circulate (I think not, but I'm not 100% sure).
