It’s come to my attention that people are… arguing over whether gardening is “revolutionary”??? That this discussion is actually happening shows how its so easy for “the discourse” to stray so far away from what progress is all about: collective liberation.

On the one side they say gardening helps to meet neighbors, builds caring relationships… on the other side they argue this isn’t political, politics means organizing beyond the local, transforming institutions, etc. Counter- and counter-counter args proliferate. Bla bla bla.

But arguing in terms of the costs and benefit of gardening misses the point so colossaly. Someone once said that socialism is about building unalienated subjects and leading fulfilling lives. Playing around in the dirt as a past-time is basically as unalienated as you can get.

Every gardener knows this. You don’t really go gardening so you can grow zucchinis that you can give to neighbors. You might say you do, but, really, you go because it’s so frigging fun and it’s made up of thousands of moments of wonder and amazement at the beauty of the world.

We are all beings at play, from the smallest inchworm to a leaf to an unborn baby kicking in a mother’s belly. Collective liberation is about fostering the play inside of us. Play is a cornerstone of a fulfilling, unalienated life. https://thebaffler.com/salvos/whats-the-point-if-we-cant-have-fun

The ability to imagine other worlds is entirely constituted by creativity and play. In turn, politics—the ability to come together and change the world—depends on the creative imagination.

Denying people their gardening makes you come off as stodgy and humorless. But more than that, it betrays a fundamentally misanthropic, anti-humanist outlook.

We don’t play in the garden so that we can build the revolution. That kind of utilitarian thinking is the domain of capitalism, where we conceive of every action as a transaction, as having utility.

We play in the garden because we *are* the revolution, because the revolution is liberation through imaginative play. Take that away from people, and you take away the essence of what makes us who we are, and the essence of what makes progress possible.