@Darth_Algar Yes and no. It’s a sandbox with very few rules imposed, so players can lie, cheat, steal, betray, etc. without the developers policing player behavior. There are a few things that will get you in trouble such as threatening violence, harassing other players, exploiting a flaw in the code, botting, and selling in-game currency for real money outside the official mechanism.
Nearly everything is produced by players, and sold in the market. Some players make insane fortunes buying/selling stuff and/or buying in one area where it’s cheap and transporting it to another area where it’s expensive to sell. When someone blows up your ship, you have to buy another one and you loose everything you had on it. Real world economists often use the market in EVE for doing studies. So in that sense it has a lot of pure dog-eat-dog capitalism.
There are areas of space that player run corps (like a clan or guild) can claim as their own sovereign territory, and some of them have tens of thousands of members. One of the interesting things that has naturally arisen from this is that a kind of “feudal socialism” has emerged within some of the largest coalitions. The collective taxes help pay for the cost of replacement ships when lost in combat defending their territory.
There are other groups that have emerged to help each other as well. There is a huge training corp that helps new players learn the game called Eve University as one example. So it’s not all throat-cutting and capitalism-gone-wild. People tend to form tight social bonds with people in their corp, working together for mutual benefit.