I always think the argument about whether Fallout is about capitalism is a bit peculiar. Because ... okay. At the highest level of interpretation, it is not. It is fundamentally a story about the conflict between the human impulse toward civilisation (kindness, cooperation and the push toward a better standard of living for everyone) and the impulse toward destruction (greed, corruption and violence).
Every Fallout entry contains people striving for the former, from the Followers of the Apocalypse who make their debut in the first game in the series right through to the Responders in Fallout 76. These people may be flawed and make mistakes, but they are always trying to make the world better. And every story also contains people committed to the latter. These are people who believe that only a particular group counts as humans with rights, and everybody else can be killed or be enslaved without even the faintest of moral qualms. They are the Master and the Unity, the Enclave, the Brotherhood of Steel, the Legion, the Institute. They're all bad news because none of them will cooperate beyond themselves.
Fallout is not, after all, a story about how capitalist America is bad and communist China is good. It is pretty damn clear that every nation in the world that had even a sliver of power before the war was abusing it; everybody was hoarding resources; everybody was succumbing to aggression.
The narration starts with Rome. It's not that humanity somehow invented greed, corruption and violence alongside capitalism and would be instantly rid of them if we abolished it. Go ask the people of Sicily about Verres. Or the people of Carthage about – well, you can't, because Carthago delenda est, after all.
Fallout is not about capitalism. But.
The thing is, Fallout, as a series, is almost entirely interested in America. It only occasionally bothers to tell what was happening anywhere else in the world. Even the information on China, America's great adversary, is pretty damn thin on the ground. Could I tell you anything sensible about what, say, Indonesia was doing at any point in the Fallout universe? No, no I could not. The writers are simply not interested in the rest of the world.
That means that when they explore a country's slide into corruption and violence the particular country they're interested in exploring is America. And that means they absolutely spend a lot of time analysing how capitalism led America to this bloody end.
Every terminal that fearmongers about unions, every story about employees being casually killed and maimed, every grim justification you can find of horrors perpetuated in the name of profit will make you pause and think ... huh. The American system is not doing itself any favours here.
This all gets muddied, of course, because Bethesda loves its microtransactions, like a lot of other companies. Yep! They are engaging in plenty of their own shitty behaviour over in the Atomic Shop. This particular bit of narration in my screenshots predates Bethesda, of course, but ... well, 1997 was a long time ago. It's all Bethesda discourse now.
Whatever else is going on, the narratives of Fallout tend to put aggressive capitalism in the same bucket as its other destructive forces. I think the game writers usually know that, even if the marketing department does not.
Fallout is not about the evils of capitalism. It thinks you can manoeuvre a lot of political systems into apocalyptic violence if you're committed enough. But it is not even a little bit shy about showing you all the ways capitalism, specifically, is vulnerable to this kind of corruption.
