Strategically speaking, cork production is a ripe target for unionization efforts, and once the unions take power in the cork industry, after making basic demands for health care, benefits, etc, they should demand seats on the board of directors at their company for every full time employee. I say this because such a demand effectively has the ability to transform a capitalist owned company into a worker owned cooperative.
Now, why do I say this? Because cork production, despite being very old, is quite resistant to automation for the reasons elaborated upon in this video. The work is also very manual, and labor intensive. It employs a lot more variable capital than constant capital. These are the sorts of industries where profit rates are consistently high. As Cockshott never tires of pointing out, empirical evidence since the 1800s consistently shows that profit rates decrease with a decrease of variable capital or an increase of constant capital. This industry has a high rate of exploitation despite being very old. Which is rare. This is due to the aforementioned resistance to automation. This is a natural resistance rather than a resistance on the part of the workers. Cork trees are all shaped different, and the trees can't just be chopped down for their bark. The trees have to be kept alive so they can be stripped over and over. And they have to be stripped carefully or they die. And you can't let a robot due it due to the unique shape of each tree. So for the foreseeable future this industry will require human workers. And the whole world drinks wine. And the vast majority of wine bottles, billions of them, are stopped with corks from the bark of the cork tree. Nearly all cork is produced in Portugal. That's a single point of failure. Organize the Portuguese cork industry and there's almost nowhere else to turn for good cork. Demand that it be made into a cooperative, and boom, you have a worker owned monopoly because almost nobody else produces this product
People say cooperatives are "petty bourgeois socialism" but I insist that certain industries have unique characteristics which make the strategy of unionize -> demand worker ownership possible. And the cork industry is one of them.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk. Naysayers, rev up your keyboards.
>>303>>306shortsightedness and capitalism, name a more iconic duo. especially ironic in an industry that requires decades before the trees are profitable.
not to downplay the genocide which is much much worse, but the IDF deliberately destroyed basically irreplaceable ancestral Palestinian olive trees that were centuries old