[1] Social equality, cooperation and workers' self-management are the main conditions required for the development of a free association of producers.
Proudhon argued for the abolition of capitalism, under which private ownership of the means of production had imposed "wage slavery" on artisans and farmers.
He believed that socialism would end the capitalist monopoly over the means of production and thereby allow both free competition and cooperation to flourish.
[3] In contrast, the German communist Karl Marx defined socialism as the abolition of all private property, rather than a redistribution of it as proposed by Proudhon.
[3] The Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin also considered a free association of producers to entail the abolition of private property, and instead advocated that the means of production be brought under common ownership.