Will Dry: The Hostile Takeover of a Dying Parliament
Clerkenwell’s concrete holds the ghosts of radical dissent. On Thursday 2 April, those ghosts find a modern voice at the Marx Library and Workers School. Manifesto Press, the engine behind our recent article on the upcoming Cultures in Resistance event at Wortley Hall and the legacies of cultures in resistance, returns. This time, the focus shifts from the northern sanctuary to the hollowed out heart of British parliamentarianism.
We exist in a crisis of presence. Space is no conceptual luxury: it is the primary site of state violence. Developers and speculators are the ones drawing the lines that erase us, treating our cultural hubs and shared commons as voids to be filled with capital. Will Dry’s Revolution and Parliament arrives as the working class is coached into the role of spectator, watching a two-party necropsy of a dying system.
This corporate co-option has bled into the music industry, a shrunken mirror of a broken parliament. The industry is no longer a platform for the revolutionary: it is an enclosure. Grassroots venues shutter for luxury flats. Artists are reduced to data-slaves for the machine. The industry is a gatekept monolith, prioritising profit over the raw, radical pulse of the streets. When physical space dies, the ability to scream against the machine dies with it. The industry wants us at the altar of celebrity, not organising for power.
Dry, a veteran of the electoral trenches for both Labour and the Communist Party, refuses the comfort of apathy. He asks what is left for the left when the traditional vehicles of socialism have been abandoned. He demands we contest every seat, not as a performance of civic duty, but as a hostile takeover of the structures that serve greed, waste and misery.
The diminishing of democratic structures is no accident. It is a calculated enclosure. Just as the commons were fenced off, our political agency and musical subcultures are ring-fenced by lobbyists and corporate interests. This gathering is for those who refuse to watch while our rights and our arts are bartered in Westminster. Join Will Dry and a range of speakers to debate whether there is space left for a genuine working class assertion of power.
Event Details
Date: Thursday 2 April, 7pm Location: Marx Library and Workers School, Clerkenwell Tickets: Book here
Will’s book will be available at a 10 percent discount for those in attendance.