Oddly enough the point of Fallout was apparently (according to Tim Cain) never meant to be “capitalism bad” but rather “war bad”.
Of course any contemporary critique of war doesn’t work without a critique of capitalism so that of course ended up being a feature of the games regardless of intention.
Tim Cain stopped contributing to the story after the first game so a lot of what he says about the franchise can be taken with a grain of salt.
Sorry but I don’t do death of the author, Fallout is officially reactionary now
I don’t know about the old games, but from Fallout 3 onwards, they always had anti-communism in it.
The first game doesn’t dabble much in ideology; its big talking point is that war is bad and everything else in the game is meant to revolve around this. The second game is more geared toward anti-fascism. Neither really touch on communism as an ideology or a system in practice.
Fallout 3 is centrist slop that simultaneously treats communism and anti-communism as being equally bad because it doesn’t have anything it actually wants to say.
New Vegas doesn’t touch on communism at all but it does offer some stark critiques of liberal democracy and colonialism (and capitalism of course) as well as Caesar’s weird Primitivist philosophy resulting from his inability to understand Hegel, which in turn attacks conservatism and similar Right-wing ideologies.
Fallout 4 doesn’t have anything to say about anything other than “slavery bad” and that’s about it. Like FO3 it’s just centrist slop with no political literacy whatsoever.
I don’t know about the other two games because nobody really played them.
The Followers of the Apocalypse in New Vegas and 2 are essentially communist and presented in a good light.
The Followers of the Apocalypse are a volunteer aid group. There’s nothing really communist about them; they’re altruists and pacifists motivated primarily by moralism. They don’t appear interested in the economic structure of societies, the use of labor, or who owns the modes of production. They’re “socialist” in a purely idealist sense.
True, but there isn’t much of a society left. Productive forces don’t really exist beyond artisanal and sustenance production, and neither does organized or capitalist modes of production. There isn’t anything to really organize, let alone lead.
They live in commune societies where the collective own the means of production, reject money, they attempt to elevate tribal groups through education, they’re anti-fascist and only maintain a tenuous relationship with the liberal NCR, and attempt to recruit through their outreach.
Society tetters between tribal and early feudal at best, and even then barely. What is a socialist to do in a “society” like that? Volunteer outreach is all that’s left, not like there’s much to do a “revolution” against.
Did anyone else notice that the new Fallout series seems strangely pro-communist?
Hollywood writers are unionized and overwhelmingly left wing. Whenever they’re left to their own devices they always create works that express left wing thought, such as what happened with Andor recently.
Whether that expression of leftist thought is placatory is another argument altogether, but the people making the art are absolutely all socialists or syndicalists at the least.
