Happiness

Happiness is a description of mental or emotional states, including positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. It is also used in the context of life satisfaction, subjective well-being, eudaimonia, flourishing and well-being.

Happiness and Libertarian Socialism

Happiness is largely dependent on both negative and positive freedom. Whether or not a anarchist society would make people more happy is unknown, however, data and testimony provide some clues, for example, George Orwell said of Revolutionary Spain:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragón one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master. Of course such a state of affairs could not last. It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth. But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug... Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull, after living with a Mbuti band, remarked, "They were a people who had found in the forest something that made life more than just worth living, something that made it, with all its hardships and problems and tragedies, a wonderful thing full of joy and happiness and free of care."

Happiness at work through satisfaction is also important, and can be provided by workers' self-management. According to a study drawing on a questionnaire from the population of the Italian province of Trento, worker cooperatives are the only form of enterprise that fosters social trust between employees. A survey conducted in Seoul, South Korea suggests that in conventional firms, the more demanding the job is, the less committed the employees are, however, this was not the case in worker cooperatives. In the US, home health aides in worker cooperatives were significantly more satisfied with their jobs than in other agencies.