December 10, 2009
With Tim Costello, who died a few days ago in Boston, the world of labor and the left worldwide have lost one of their keenest and most powerful voices.
Tim was born in Boston 64 years ago, the son of a construction laborer who bequeathed to him the sense and value of working-class organizing. A fuel oil delivery driver, Tim had set up an office in the back of his truck where he devoted his spare time to a serious self-education while engaging in union (first with the Teamsters, eventually with the Service Employees ) and political organizing. An insatiable reader, he had studied at the New School in New York and at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where historian Jim Green described him as “’Cosmic Tim, who seemed to have trucked everywhere and read everything.”
Italian readers learnt to appreciate him some thirty years ago, through a great book on the first oil shock recession, which appeared in Italian under the (odd) title The worse…the worse. Daily struggles in hard times (Tanto peggio tanto peggio…La lotta quotidiana in tempi difficili (Rosenberg & Sellier, 1979). The Italian title missed the connection that the book intended to establish with the artisan-thinker hero of the American Revolution Tom Paine and his emphasis on the importance of “common sense” and the concrete world. The outcome of a research trip across the country to study the impact of the crisis, the book was a treasure trove of the many inventive ways through which ordinary people managed to survive and get by in the grip of the recession. Underpinning it was the idea that “what happens day by day is the true gist of human life: if daily life is unsatisfying, artificial, poor, unfree, any political, religious or philosophical justification is nothing but platitude.”
Written with Jeremy Brecher, the book inaugurated a long-standing collaboration which has lasted until today. Such a collaboration has given us such gems of analysis and intervention as Building Bridges. The Emerging Grassroots Coalition (1990), or works on “globalization from below” (Globalization from Below, Contro il capitale globale, Feltrinelli, 2002, Come farsi un movimentog lobale, DeriveApprodi) which developed a critique of neoliberal globalization based on a “Lilliputian strategy” for change starting from the bottom up at a micro and community level and containing the seeds of the future society. A long and growing commitment to the environmental cause had led him recently to help found the Labor Network for Sustainability.
Ferdinando Fasce
Il Manifesto