1. Some people eat more food than others. One person may want one sandwich, one person may want three. The person who takes three may well be working, but he isn't sacrificing anything for the extra sandwiches, he simply takes them. This could cause a problem for societies' supply. How do you plan to deal with that?
I guess you could ration food, but that doesn't seem consistent with the beliefs of most Reds here.
2. Also, what stops someone from just taking, say, 25 sandwiches, eating one, and storing the others for later? Or is this an acceptable thing to do? (For the record, the reason I see this as a potential problem is that someone could take far more than they'll ever eat. Its not NECESSARILY a problem, but it could be, so I'm curious for thoughts.)
In a post-commodity, pre-abundance society, consumption would still be limited, it simply wouldn't be limited through market mechanisms. Each individual would be allotted so much "credit", for want of a better word, to redeem as they saw fit. The departure from a process of commodity exchange is that they would not be exchange these money for commodities, with that money continue to circulate as money, but redeeming their credit against goods as the embodiment of a labour process. Rights and costs of distribution would be primarily determined on the basis of labour time, i.e. how much labour a worker contributes to the social product, and how much labour time is embodied in any given service or item, although, because this is a utilitarian measure rather than a basic premise of the economic system, this could be bent when it is deemed preferable (e.g. universal and unconditional provision of healthcare).
In a society of abundance, a post-scarcity society, things would be different, of course, and its entirely possible that we may have free access to material goods, and very probably to mundane goods such as food and so forth. This depends on what a state of "abundance", always a vague term, would actually entail. The most optimistic outlook be a world of Star Trek-like replicators fuelled by a fully sustainable energy source, in which all of us could have basically everything we wanted, while a more ascetic (not to mention less helplessly speculative) vision is simply of a world in which everyone has enough to satisfy their material needs to the extent that they can live a fulfilling life (and some would say that we have, in fact, already have the potential for this, and certainly digital abundance is a given). In the former, then you could have as many sandwiches as you felt like- take a thousand and build a fort, who cares?- while in the latter, "soft" restrictions would still be in place, or at the very least certain expectations of reasonable consumption. Unfortunately, I'm very much not an expert on this particular, often somewhat arcane filed of thought, so any further discussion I could offer would be rather speculative, and probably quite open to having holes poked it in.
3. Where do fiction writers fit in Communist society, if anywhere?
They certainly have a place, as do all creators of art, so the question is how their labour will be integrated into the social process of production, and I will grant you that it is a tricky one. Compared to other workers, the subjective utility of what they produce varies very highly from individual producer to individual producer, and it's impossible to say "X many people want music" in the same way that you could say "X many people want bread" (which is a gross oversimplification of how democratic planning would actually work, but you get my drift). Historically, I would image the solution would probably have emerged in the form of what you might call "artists' syndicates", in which creators deal with the council structure as collective entities, but today, with the massive increases in communication technology, I think it would be far more possible for creators to be integrated on an individual basis.
It's also important to remember that under communism we would no longer see a system of wage labour, and so would not necessarily see norms of exclusive employment; it would be entirely feasible for a worker to gradually devote more and more time to creative endeavours as the demand for their output grew, the community gradually relieving them of other duties in recognition of this. You might begin your writing career by simply devoting your spare evenings to it while still putting in your six hours at the widget plant, and then gradually enter into an arrangement where you maybe only work four hours a day, or four days a week, or what have you, and so on and so forth. Unlike capitalism, this would not be a series of gambles taken in pursuit of an uncertain goal, but the development of your individual creative capacities to their fullest, which is, after all, the point. Just because in capitalist society one thing is considered utilitarian and the other a luxury- carpentry on the one, say, and literature on the other- doesn't mean that this will be so in communism society; both will be similarly regarded as a creative endeavour possessing of their own "nobility", for want of a better word, and as productive processes which produce things of utility.
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