I though about starting this thread in /hobby/, but considering I'm not interested in talking about the merits of the game-itself, and rather to discuss the specific dilemma of factions, I thought I'd get a more focused discussion here.
The Wildcard ending notwithstanding, there are principally three different factions in the game you can side with: Caesar's Legion, New California Republic, and Mr. House. To begin, Caesar's Legion is a fascist power lead by a historical materialist (even though the writers somewhat misrepresent Hegel in their dialogue about the dialectic, the general theme is maintained) most players misunderstand Caesar as just a LARPer rather than someone who is genuinely trying to restart history. His Legion, is admittedly a hegemonic autocracy that Caesar intends to use to subjugate humanity under one banner, so that their collective progress would be accelerated. It's entirely possible to interpret Caesar as just history's janitor trying to send humanity back through the motions and antiquity to try and reach a better result than rushing back to the "good ol' days" like the NCR, rather than someone who takes pleasure in creating a slave society that is an objectively malignant entity.
The NCR is presented as the return of the old Bourgeois Dictatorship of the US, their government is a corrupt expansionist bureaucracy that can only adequately administrate war, meanwhile the actual body of the legislation itself has a lineage of benevolent autocrats (tandy) and is ruled by the interest of the "brahmin barons" (kulaks), this is a critique that Caesar presents in his analysis of the NCR (which happens to sound out-of-context Marxian). Caesar correctly identifies the NCR as a reincarnation of the failed Bourgeois state that brought about the very predicament of the wasteland, and seeks to use them as his component in creating a society apt enough to the material conditions of the wasteland.
The strangest character in this dynamic is Mr. House, if the NCR is a light veil for a Bourg dictatorship, then Mr. House is an open window, making no illusions to the player about his proposed autocratic status and ex-Bourg origin. Since the wasteland cannot be considered Capitalist (as a true economic analysis of the Fallout universe would lack too many necessary factors to be accurate) we have to assume that the wastes can be best surmised as a scavenger-economy wherein the most valuable resource is electricity and armament
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