NWI DSA May 2025 Recap

Hello comrades! It’s Jackie, your friendly neighborhood NWI DSA Co-Chair- here to present the May 2025 recap for our chapter. 

Chapter Announcements

• As of our June meeting we now have a full Steering Committee again! More details to come in the June newsletter.
• Two June actions coming up on the 21st and 28th respectively at MLK Jr. Park in East Chicago, check our social media for more details!
  

Campaigns and Events

In May we started working with local organizers from NWI Community Solidarity, a group focused primarily on organizing for immigrant rights and Palestinian liberation, alongside coalition work on other issues. They are known in the area for hosting weekly Palestine vigils, as shown in the example older poster below from their Instagram page @nwicommunitysolidarity. We see NWICS as aligned with NWI DSA’s goals of building and strengthening a structured foundation for community struggle.

On May 30th, we also attended the Timebank Community Potluck, a potluck co-hosted by local mutual aid groups NWI Region Resilience and Joy Bomb Social Center. Timebanking works by having community members offer or request different services, transacting in ‘hours’ rather than money, goods, etc. Events like this potluck also count towards these hours, where people ‘deposit’ the time they spent making food and/or attending the potluck.

Notable Internal Developments

On May 8th, we held a chapter meeting with a built-in social afterwards. Chapter members Eve B and Jackie H (myself) were elected as delegate and alternate respectively for the upcoming 2025 National DSA Convention, which will be held this August in Chicago. As your alternate delegate, I am excited to help Eve represent our chapter in national DSA deliberation! You can learn more about the 2025 DSA Convention here: https://convention2025.dsausa.org/

As mentioned in the previous newsletter, Red Reading Group by NWI DSA got to read Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx and discuss it on May 14th. We excited to announce our next text, Michael Parenti’s Against Empire. Parenti is a often mentioned in socialist circles as an excellent writer on US intervention and exploitation of the Global South. As socialists living in the imperial core, it is crucial that we actively work to deprogram the biases that are instilled to apologize and advocate for the continued extraction of superprofits from Global South workers. The chapter has purchased physical copies of this book and are in the process of distributing it to participating reading group members. In the meantime, folks who’d like to read a condensed article discussing modern capitalist imperialism are recommended to check out this Monthly Review article summarizing Unequal Exchange: https://monthlyreview.org/2025/03/01/arghiri-emmanuel-and-unequal-exchange-past-present-and-future-relevance/