Spend enough time watching Youtube videos, and you will inevitably come across one that tells you all of the problems in our world today are due to capitalism. They tell us how capitalism is unnatural, and how a “Gift” economy came before capitalist economies. This I do not doubt, given that capitalism is estimated to have started around 500 years ago. Another thing that existed before capitalism is slavery, which dates back to ancient times, because one of the inherent problems of a gift economy is slavery; which, I would argue, is a problem that capitalism solves.

Imagine your life without civilization; most of your energy and time would be spent in finding safe food to eat, while avoiding becoming food yourself. Your best bet for a home might be a hole in the ground, and you would always be living on the brink of starvation, which is the natural state for life in the natural world. Life would be short and brutal. Humans evolved to recognize the value of community and formed hunter-gatherer tribal populations, of which the gift economy was a critical feature. What constituted a gift could be a tool, a weapon, parts of or a whole animal, or even a person; anything tangible that was of use to the other party in order to garner their goodwill. We have evidence of hereditary slavery in such populations, as demonstrated by the the Haida and Tlingit tribes. The domestication of animals and agriculture lead to a greater demand for people to do undesirable work, resulting in chattel slavery in these early gift economies. Ancient religious texts such as the Old Testament Holy Bible go so far as to explain how to keep and treat a slave.

In a gift economy, slavery is necessary to determine who gets to do the undesirable, dangerous jobs. Who gets to take care of the putrid waste we generate? Who gets to work their hands to the bone in the fields? Who toils under a hot sun building roads? Who goes down into the mines, risking life and limb, to extract the resources we need? There is always a steady supply of hungry people desperate to survive; teach your slaves to be “Fruitful and multiply,” and there’s really no incentive for more progress than that in a gift economy. Furthermore, you can keep your slaves working all day every day until they drop dead.

An important feature of capitalism that differentiated it from a gift economy was it assigned value to a person’s labour necessary to do something over a period of time. It allowed us to separate the people from the work they do, and those things that require greater skill and labour tend to cost more than things that require less skill and labour. Today, we have the concept that we can “Gift” our time to someone, but even today this is a difficult concept for many people to understand, as many who are generous with their time soon find they get taken advantage of and are unappreciated largely by those who do not desire to do any actual real work for a living, because they consider themselves “Too important” or such work to be “Beneath” them and unworthy of their time. Any tradesperson who has done work for family is well aware of how quickly they can go from middle class to slavery. The concept of a person’s time being a gift is unnatural and really can only exist in a capitalist economy.

Capitalism has been a motivator for many of the innovations that make all our lives better. For example, the invention of steam engines, electric motors, and internal combustion engines came about in order to reduce the expense of human labour, because capitalism put a price tag on that human labour. The refinement, harmonization, and standardization of clocks, calendars, weights and measures and exchange rates that make all trade fair and equitable. It’s no coincidence that some of the greatest advancements in the history of humankind coincided with the advent of capitalism, including the abolishment of slavery in western democracies. A day labourer working on the roads or in a sewer plant can, with their fellow labourers, collectively demand fair compensation for their work so that they can earn enough money to have savings so they can retire from their labours in their old age and grow old with dignity and without relying on the goodwill of people who wouldn’t care if they ever lived or died.

In all fairness, capitalism is not a one size fits all solution for all of humanity’s problems. We will always have greed, envy, jealousy, and hate that no economic system can ever overcome. However, capitalism is always evolving and adapting to account for these deficiencies of humanity. For example, moving from the gold standard to the gross domestic product shifted the power from traditional slave owners and wealth hoarders to a new and growing working class. We have witnessed for the first time a middle class emerging where none had been before, where the people who do the work necessary for our civilization to function get to enjoy the fruits of their labours; where each and every one of us can be a capitalist, selling our time and labour to the highest bidder, motivating us to improve and refine ourselves and our processes. We will always get people who will attempt to game and cheat the system, as we always have, but we have empowered the working class to organize and demand their fair share of compensation. It’s not perfect, but it’s a lot better now than what it used to be.

So, what is the actual problem today? The work of the tradespeople and labourers who make our society function go unnoticed and largely under-appreciated. We have generations of people accustomed to flushing their poop away and seeing it magically disappear, never to be thought of again. People complain about the price and quality of housing while having no interest in learning a trade in order to build a house. They complain about the price of gas and energy without being interested in working in an energy sector trade. They complain about the cost of food while having no interest in actually working in a field (we need to bring in migrant workers for that). They want to earn a living selling a subscription, a warranty, a plan, or advertisements in a Youtube video that provides them with an income while they can live a life of leisure on the backs of the working class without even knowing it, until things like food, houses, and energy start cutting into their lifestyle of leisure because those workers demand more to maintain their working class lifestyle as inflation eats up the savings of the wealthy money hoarders and gives more power to that working class.

The next time some Youtuber starts complaining about capitalism, just remember; they’re trying to make a living making Youtube videos; or, more specifically, the advertising revenue that’s generated from their Youtube videos. They will not be the first in line to work at the sewer plant in their utopian vision of a gift economy, but if there is such a thing as karma, perhaps they will be the first to be forced to work there as a slave as there will be no need for their Youtube videos to sell advertising in a gift economy.