Chav Solidarity (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781036989484)

Chav Solidarity

by D. Hunter

Part memoir, part political meditation, part two fingers up at respectability politics, Chav Solidarity is unlike anything else written about class in Britain today.

D. Hunter grew up underclass. His first twenty-five years ran on the informal economy: sex work, dealing, robbing, and violence, shaped by addiction, abuse, and life on the streets. For the years since, he's worked as an anti-capitalist community organiser and a mental health support worker. In this collection of essays he turns an unflinching eye on his own life to ask a bigger question: how do our class experiences shape the way we think, feel, relate to one another, and do our politics?

To the political left, Hunter argues, people like him are treated as ignorant and ill-informed. To the triumphant right, they're the discarded waste product of the working class. Refusing both caricatures, Hunter writes with a bluntness and honesty rarely allowed into conversations about poverty. He dismantles the middle-class framing of self-care and mental health, exposes how "the left" so often fails the very people it claims to speak for, and makes the case for a mutual aid built on action rather than words: care, solidarity, and survival forged under pressure.

Searing, funny, self-critical, and genuinely hopeful, Chav Solidarity is a memoir, a manifesto, a confession, and a call to organise. It's a book about trauma and identity, but above all about the possibility of extending our arms toward one another.

Content warning: This book contains references to sexual violence, physical and gendered violence, racism, drug use, suicide, transphobia, murder, and police brutality.