Annie Xibos Spencer – How to Break An Addiction

Annie Xibos Spencer discusses what the opioid epidemic teaches us about the addiction at the root of our social life—and how we free ourselves from it. With Ray Luc Levasseur and Mea Starr Tavares.

How To Break An Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto For Quitting Capitalism (Common Notions, Oct 2024) paints an original and dynamic portrait of the nature of the opioid crisis while offering original commentary on what the crisis portends about the present historical conjuncture. Interrogating long- and short-run, macro and micro, national and global, structural and personal factors, it takes the ongoing US opioid crisis as a jumping off point to illustrate the profound conclusion: capitalism at its core is an addiction.

In a blend of memoir, historical record, original research, and theoretical and cultural analysis, critical geographer and harm reduction activist Annie Spencer argues against a dominant ‘progressive’ presumption of the need to reform (or ‘save’) capitalism, demonstrating instead the imperative to think, organize, and enact new ways of being and provisioning together on a living Earth.

How To Break An Addiction renders visible the extent to which the world we inhabit today is made by addiction—in capital’s image—and against life and well-being. Spencer calls for redress of the deepening crisis of addiction and the so-called ‘epidemic’ of pain at its root; for a paradigm shift away from the dominant economic logic in favor of new kinds of ecosystemic social practice and provision. We must innovate a new way of being human together in the here and now. Spencer’s first-person narration anchors rigorous and far-reaching research and theory, making for an original and impactful tour through capital’s addiction to crisis and our ability—and need—to break from it.

Annie Xibos Spencer was born in North Philadelphia and grew up in Venice, Florida. They studied economics and international studies at New College of Florida and Latin American political economy at La Universidad de Belgrano in Buenos Aires. Their undergraduate honors thesis on the role of the IMF in the Argentine Peso Crisis earned them a job at the World Bank Institute where they worked as a writer and program evaluator while obtaining a MA in International Trade and Investment Policy at George Washington University. Spencer spent two summers in Dhaka, Bangladesh on a fellowship where she studied Bengali language and culture at the Independent University of Bangladesh and learned from feminist-Marxist agrarian movement, Naya Krishi Andolon. Spencer was an active participant in Occupy Wall Street and a founding member of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign and STRIKE Debt.

Spencer has worked in mutual-aid harm reduction and organized on the opioid epidemic and against state abandonment of people who use drugs in Maine. In 2020 they completed a PhD in human geography from the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center, where they won the 2017 Provost’s Award for Scholarship in the Public Interest and the 2016 Revolutionizing American Studies dissertation award. Spencer was a doctoral fellow with the Center for Place, Culture and Politics and the Mellon Committee on Globalization and Social Change. They have taught economic geography, economics and cultural studies at Hunter College CUNY, the University of Southern Maine, and Bates College. They live in Sweden.