Marx viewed ideological and classed based understandings of the social world as analogous to images in a “camera obscura”, where the outcome is backwards or distorted. Commonplace discourse “gets it backward” in the same way: causes and effects are often conflated. Current understandings of the relationship between poverty, crime and policing are examined. Rather than a conventional, individualreductionist analysis, sociologists are encouraged to engage in historical and structural investigation. Marx's camera obscura analogy is developed as a tool used to both shed light on power relations as presently conceived and to understand them in an alternative fashion.
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