January 8, 2010
KEEP ON TRUCKIN’: Tim Costello, the blue-collar intellectual, truck-driving internationalist and globally respected author who died in December at 64 (from pancreatic cancer), fully embraced the anti-corporate globalization slogan: “Another World Is Possible.” Costello was the energetic founder of groups such as the Campaign on Contingent Work, the North American Alliance for Fair Employment and Global Labor Strategies, and he wrote (with Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith) groundbreaking books like Global Village or Global Pillage (1994) and Globalization From Below (2000), which forged newer and deeper understandings of the importance of international solidarity on economic and social issues.
Costello delighted in the late ’90s renewal of activism around globalization, and he celebrated the new tools available to organizers. In one of his last articles for The Nation (“Social Movements 2.0,” January 15, 2009), he wrote with Brecher and Smith that the “online universe is not simply another place for people to congregate, circulate a petition, debate politics or mail out a newsletter…. Instead, the web is increasingly looking like the invention of the printing press, which radically changed the lives of even those who could not read, by spurring the Protestant reformation and scientific revolution.” That was classic Costello: rooted in the old struggle between privilege and the cooperative commonwealth, yet ever at the ready to employ new technologies, adopt smarter tactics and build broader coalitions.
JOHN NICHOLS