If you were to find some place in the middle of nowhere in the woods, where no one was living, on land no one was using, which types of people would leave you in peace, and which would feel justified intruding into your life and initiating violence against you?

If you happened to be anywhere inside the ~3,800,000 square miles claimed by the U.S. ruling class as its territory, a grand total of zero Democrats and Republicans would advocate leaving you in peace. They might differ in what they want you forced to fund, and which of your behaviors they want regulated and coercively controlled, but NONE of them would actually condone leaving you in peace. None.

But guess what. Neither would communists, including those who call themselves “anarcho-communists.” You see, according to them, merely possessing resources or valuable material objects–especially if they can call it “the means of production”–makes you part of a collective equation, which may very well (according to them) justify someone coming in and stealing from you, in the name of the common good, or someone who “needs” whatever you have. Your mere existence, and the existence of whatever you have–even if you harvested or produced every bit of it yourself–can magically make you somehow indebted to the collective. If, according to their completely arbitrary assessment, you have more than you “need,” they will decide that it’s not rightfully yours, and may come to try to take it.

To me, that’s a pretty damn basic test to see whether someone’s “philosophy” is sane and moral, and whether the person is actually an anarchist: if you are minding your own damn business, not hurting anyone else, will they leave you alone? In the case of communists, the answer is, no, they will not leave you alone.