On Monday, November 3rd, join the conversation between friends Annie Spencer and Mikkel Krause Frantzen on Annie’s new book, How To Break An Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism. The book takes the present day US Opioid Epidemic as a jumping off point for exploring capitalism’s existential quest for growth’s, framing the system as the true fiend threatening life the world over. In a blend of memoir, research and social theory, the book explores the long- and short-run factors that collided to produce the epidemic, and includes a tour through opium’s role in earlier phases of imperialism as well as an analysis of the neoliberal turn’s “breaking the backs” of the blue collar working class.
With relevance to the European context, the book explores how dislocation, pain and personal-responsibility narratives fed the formerly unionised working class into algorithmic right-wing rage machines, and what we must do to create the world otherwise. The “method-in-a-manifesto” element talks about undoing capitalism’s paradigm, taking aim at economic logic and partitioned ways of seeing, and models how we take a decolonized, relational leap in the our collective consciousness toward revolutionary ways of seeing and being together.
Annie Spencer is a writer, educator, organizer, and artistic researcher from the US based in Sweden. Annie has a PhD in Geography from the CUNY Graduate Center and has taught economics, economic geography, and cultural politics at universities in the US and organized against debt and state abandonment of people who use drugs. How to Break an Addiction is their first book. They are working on a second, The We Know How To Party Program. Their current project The We Know How To Party is a popular education, culture and consciousness effort focused on relational healing and collective capacity building that asks how we might compost capital to arrive back at a liveable way of life on Earth.
Mikkel Krause Frantzen is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and literary critic at the newspaper Politiken. He is the author of several books, including En fremtid uden fremtid (2018), Going Nowhere, Slow - The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (2019), Klodens Fald (2021) and The Birth of the Financial Thriller - Making a Killing in the 1970s (2025). He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Green Gambit - Manifesto for the Climate Endgame.
On Monday, November 3rd, join the conversation between friends Annie Spencer and Mikkel Krause Frantzen on Annie’s new book, How To Break An Addiction: A Method-in-a-Manifesto for Quitting Capitalism. The book takes the present day US Opioid Epidemic as a jumping off point for exploring capitalism’s existential quest for growth’s, framing the system as the true fiend threatening life the world over. In a blend of memoir, research and social theory, the book explores the long- and short-run factors that collided to produce the epidemic, and includes a tour through opium’s role in earlier phases of imperialism as well as an analysis of the neoliberal turn’s “breaking the backs” of the blue collar working class.
With relevance to the European context, the book explores how dislocation, pain and personal-responsibility narratives fed the formerly unionised working class into algorithmic right-wing rage machines, and what we must do to create the world otherwise. The “method-in-a-manifesto” element talks about undoing capitalism’s paradigm, taking aim at economic logic and partitioned ways of seeing, and models how we take a decolonized, relational leap in the our collective consciousness toward revolutionary ways of seeing and being together.
Annie Spencer is a writer, educator, organizer, and artistic researcher from the US based in Sweden. Annie has a PhD in Geography from the CUNY Graduate Center and has taught economics, economic geography, and cultural politics at universities in the US and organized against debt and state abandonment of people who use drugs. How to Break an Addiction is their first book. They are working on a second, The We Know How To Party Program. Their current project The We Know How To Party is a popular education, culture and consciousness effort focused on relational healing and collective capacity building that asks how we might compost capital to arrive back at a liveable way of life on Earth.
Mikkel Krause Frantzen is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen and literary critic at the newspaper Politiken. He is the author of several books, including En fremtid uden fremtid (2018), Going Nowhere, Slow - The Aesthetics and Politics of Depression (2019), Klodens Fald (2021) and The Birth of the Financial Thriller - Making a Killing in the 1970s (2025). He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled The Green Gambit - Manifesto for the Climate Endgame.
