The Solar Union: Unemployment II

"...only some twenty-five percent of the adult population of Earth were even partially employed. Of course, no one starved, a citizen's allowance was enough to ensure living quite comfortably, but the genius class which could still work and get extra money for it was hated and envied. Yet the geniuses had to be paid, or not enough of them would have accepted the positions which still had to be filled by humans."
-Poul Anderson, The Snows Of Ganymede (New York, 1958), Chapter 5, pp. 49-50.

There are several issues here. First, I envisage a future society where:

everyone lives comfortably;
everyone is helped by education and training to do whatever fulfills them - in harmony with others;
thus, there will no longer be a distinction between work and leisure;
"geniuses" will not have to be induced to do whatever they do best by an offer of extra money;
indeed, money will have become redundant as a means of exchange or distribution.

Clearly, the Solar Union does not operate on that advanced level yet. However, hopefully, it could be in transition to it. For James Blish's and Norman L Knight's account of a high energy society with mass unemployment, see here.

Secondly, who pays the few who work? My understanding is that anyone who works for pay produces more than the value of that pay. Otherwise they would not be employed. If the employer is private, then the surplus value is profit. If the employer is the state, then there is still surplus value although it may be called something else. The only alternative is workers working not for any employer but for themselves, collectively.

So are the geniuses employed by competing companies or by the monolithic state of the Solar Union? If the latter, then the Union has no external competitor although it maintains the massive armed force of the Solar Guard. However, it has an internal "protean enemy." Here is a contemporary equivalent:

"...one of the glaring contradictions in the political life of [Latin America] is the prominence of the military despite the lack of threats from neighboring states. Instead, the major source of threat and conflict is securocratic, stemming from social unrest..."
-Jeff Halper, War Against The People (London, 2015), p. 220.