You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.
If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.
Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.
So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.
You were rewarded in some way. You got the thing you made, or if it was a gift to someone, you enhanced your relationship with that person.
If a person gets no reward of any kind for their work, they stop doing that work. As they should.
Money and capitalism come into the picture when you want to motivate people to make something they won’t necessarily get to keep or use themselves, which they cannot then give as a gift, which does not give them the pleasure of artistic expression.
So yeah people can make things without money in the limited cases where there’s another form of reward. But modern societies are scaled way past people just making the things that they themselves receive immediate benefit from. You get economies from scale by mass production, and no one needs 10,000 k kitchen knives.