It is not fascism, because while fascism is inconsistently and vaguely defined it generally involves idealization of the state as guardian and embodiment of the

It is not fascism, because while fascism is inconsistently and vaguely defined it generally involves idealization of the state as guardian and embodiment of the nation, which is a collective identity held to possess greater value than the self. In Robocop, the state is impotent and people are directionless, and no sense of national identity is depicted at all. OCP seems entirely unconcerned with what people do or think or what values they have, as long as they continue to spend and be exploitable. Nevertheless, by the time Robocop starts, that fictional US is no longer capitalist in my opinion. It clearly WAS a market economy, and that’s why OCP is there, but now the government has suffered state capture… and while that can happen from free market capitalism, it’s very much a post-capitalist condition. The market is no longer functional, because OCP has acquired such unchecked power to exert coercive force that they replace the government that is supposed to monopolize such things. The government of Robocop’s Detroit is so broken it can’t run its own police force, so it turns the job over to OCP which has all kinds of weapons and killer robots. Capitalism requires private property rights, which is failing in Robocop - no one can feel secure in anything. They can get robbed in their stores, at home, or walking down the street — and anyway, no matter how good a job Robocop does, OCP is still going to forcibly acquire all the land, knock down the old city and displace everyone to build a new town where OCP is the landlord of everything. This is more reminiscent of feudalism — OCP is the crown, and the crown owns all the land, but it delegates responsibility to nobles, who extract value for their own interests (like the corporate bad guy selling the right to operate drug monopoly in the new city to the criminal bad guy). Obviously, Robocop is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to real persons or events is entirely coincidental… right? :)