The new memes reminding us that the police serve to protect people and that Obama should be more outspoken about the recent shootings of police officers are no doubt in response to the strong resentment and growing hostility aimed at police. But this latter resentment is not really about any one police action, e.g., an instance of police brutality, whether racially motivated or not. The resentment is due to the fact that the police, a repressive state apparatus, protect the socioeconomic system categorically. It makes no difference if the system and its laws are hurtful, unfair, and so on, including the ostensible means to bring about positive social change that are already built into the system, e.g., voting. The police are “just doing their job.” And they are.

One here should recall the genius in Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes and the way the text defamiliarizes the relation between subject and state apparatus, citizen and police. Boulle’s gorillas (military-police) help reproduce the orangutan-chimp State (economics, science, and ethos) without ever a moment of reflection or doubt. The gorillas have their guns and horses, and they enforce the law. That’s it.

Now none of this is to suggest that a police officer is a gorilla, or that there is no such thing as a kind cop. Rather, as an institutional, material body, the police are a force that prevents social change unconditionally by protecting and reproducing class relations spontaneously. Like Boulle’s gorillas, the police act on behalf of the State (which, by the way, has itself been defamiliarized as a functionary for the capitalist class, i.e., to legislate on behalf of monopoly and our robber barons as Marx suggested so long ago).

This state apparatus–the police–is indeed a powerful one and certainly in some instances violent and racist. Yet the recent deaths and brutalities (Eric Garner, Sarah Bland, Michael Brown and the events of Ferguson, MO) merely lay bare the larger relation between subject, apparatus, and State. Police racism is absolutely inexcusable and intolerable, but it’s also beside the point. Until one recognizes that larger structural reality, the change one really wants won’t come.