^Not from a Marxist viewpoint, iirc.
The real difference between strains of socialism/communism is between the tactics of those like Vlad Lenin and those of people like Eduard Bernstein.
A lot of people bandy about the term "post-scarcity" economy but I'm not really sure what that's supposed to mean. Yes, they have replicators--so what? That merely makes things cheaper, not free. If they're run on fusion or antimatter power, scarcity is merely moved up the economic food chain to the energy regime on which their society is based. Practical fusion may utilize fuel plentiful enough to be almost free, but even so our deuterium resources are quite finite and may be calculated, and given the outrageous energy expenditures transporters, replicators, and holodecks must have, I submit fusion may not be practical. Antimatter would fit the bill but it is of course not plentiful at all in this neck of the woods and must be produced somewhere from other energy resources. I positively reject standard solar power as a means to energize atomic reassemblers on a worldwide scale.
But regardless of source, no supply is infinite, but only conscious limitations keep demand from being so. In the Federation, either those limitations are innate, a result of our "evolved" sensibilities, or they are externally enforced, by a bureaucracy that oversees energy quotae for Federation citizens. In likelihood, a combination of both is evoked.
The Federation is likely a command economy. No physical or monotonous labor is required, with most of the foundations of the economy surely being automated. Intellectual, creative labor seems to flow naturally from the ideologically indoctrinated populace, and I don't mind this, as the people who do the best work in creative fields would probably do it whether they got paid or not, especially if their basic requirements of food, shelter, and entertainment were being met whether they did anything or not.
As there is still a democracy, ultimately power over this command economy rests in the hands of the people, but they probably don't bother exercising it, because the status quo is close to perfection: I suspect a majority of people in the Federation are lazy holoaddicts. And really, why blame them? Their ancestors sacrificed and worked precisely so that such a utopia could be attained. Of course, there are still those who are ambitious and dream of more... these sort of impulses are sublimated into the civilian economy as described above and Starfleet, whose purpose is to learn all that is learnable and extend the frontiers of the Federation's ability to tap energy sources, whatever those may be.
All in all, it's communist, but it's pretty sweet.
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