If you need to settle something. And it's important. Then you need to settle it on top of a building. With Swords. In the rain.

Thoughts on the Brotherhood of Steel circa New Vegas

I did a write up on the Brotherhood of Steel circa New Vegas

They're organized at a village level. Each village is nominally ruled by an elder, but the elder seems to have very limited direct authority except on military matters. The villages are organized in a clan structure. The clan has a nominal hierarchy but ultimately the villages have a high degree of independence. At both the village and the clan level the leaders rely heavily on consensus.

The Brotherhood clan has two primary castes which are the most important aspect of personal identity for it's members; Knights handle most military affairs, military technology, and protect the villages. Scribes handle learning, history, and most importantly science. Both castes have important roles inside and outside the village and while they may clash on some matters they are deeply interdependent and both are highly respected in Brotherhood society.

Due to the small population and the low level of political complexity decision making in the Brotherhood relying heavily on traditional roles and consensus. The elders can order their nominal subordinates around but the subordinates have a lot of power to push back by the time honored tradition of slacking off, misinterpreting orders, or just losing things. Moreover, because the community is so small and so insular there is a huge social cost for alienating anyone, This tends to encourage moderating views while pushing extremes to the periphery, even to the point where particularly disruptive individuals may be sentenced to a sort of semi-exile.

The clan is extremely insular, limiting contact with the outside world to trade matters and military encounters. The Brotherhood's internal economy seems to be entirely social. Individuals, even of high rank, have few personal possessions beyond clothes and odds and ends. Low ranking members live in communal barracks while high ranking members have small personal accommodations. Eating, bathing, and pretty much all other normal activities seem to be communal and likely social in nature, with very little concept of privacy within the village.

Most important property, including the village, most weapons and armor, supplies, and so forth are communally held and given out on a need basis. There seems to be little if any economic stratification and the economy within the village seems to be almost entirely communistic; The village owns all property and individuals use it as needed, returning it to communal stores when not in use.

The Brotherhood trades with the world outside the village using a combination of cash and barter, like most of the wasteland. The brotherhood likely employs its extraordinary technical skills, combined with advanced (albeit small scale) manufacturing capabilities to either produce high tech items for sale or repair high tech items. The presumably trade these items for food stuff, raw materials, tech items, and medical supplies. Beyond economic trade the Brotherhood seems to have a high degree of self sufficiency as the military vaults and bunkers they occupy were intended to survive in a sealed condition for extended periods of time.

I would submit, based on this analysis, that far from being capitalists the Brotherhood amounts to a very small scale, local communal society. Nor are they anarchists, having a strong internal structure with established hierarchies, albeit mostly based on tradition rather than overt coercion. Their advanced small scale fabrication abilities, extremely durable material goods and buildings, and spartan living style make them effectively a post-industrial society, able to manufacture or scavenge all needed technologies using what is effectively household industry. With no real production of consumer goods or mass manufacture they do not have the economic structure that would create stratification between a working class and a capital owning class, and indeed hold property communally at the village level.

TLDR; They're not really socialists or anarchists or capitalists. They're a low complexity society based on village life and an extended clan. They exist as a nation in the cultural sense but are not stratified or structured enough to constitute a state, in contrast to the highly structured nation-states of the NCR and the Legion, as well as the city-State of New Vegas.

In a sense they are in the position similar to low complexity tribes being confronted with imperial expansion during the 15-20th centuries. While they are distinctive in having a measurably superior technical base that makes them a serious military power they are still extremely vulnerable to imperialism due to their reliance on their (hardened military long term survival bunker) villages to maintain their way of life, making retreat from the edges of imperial expansion almost impossible.