What the opioid epidemic teaches us about the addiction at the root of our social life—and how we free ourselves from it. Join us at Making Worlds in a conversation Annie Spencer author of How to Break an Addiction and David Spataro, organizer, and community college professor.

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How To Break An Addiction 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.

PRESENTERS

Annie Xibos Spencer is a writer, educator, and organizer trained in economics and human geography, whose work focuses on global politics, economy, colonization and liberation. They have worked in mutual-aid harm reduction and organized on the opioid epidemic and against state abandonment of people who use drugs.

David Spataro is an organizer, community college professor, and recent transplant to Philadelphia. David’s research is on mutualism in social movements. He is currently studying the criminalization of mutual aid groups during the People’s Park riots in Berkeley, and the role played by those mutual aid organizations in a ballot initiative to decentralize Berkeley’s police department and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they police.