Can python threads access variables in the namespace?

I have a script that creates a bunch of threads, runs a program to use the threads to run tasks from a queue, and returns something from each thread. I want to count how many of these returned successfully, so I set a variable "successful=0" and increment it every time the queue reports a task completed successfully.

However, I'm getting "UnboundLocalError: local variable 'successful' referenced before assignment"

What's going on?

Here's some example code:

successful = 0

q = Queue(200)
for i in range(100):
    t=Thread(target=foo)
    t.daemon=True
    t.start()
def foo():
    while True:
        task=q.get()
        #do some work
        print task
        successful+=1 # triggers an error
        q.task_done()
for i in range(100):
    q.put("Foo")
q.join()
print successful