After the foregoing digression, I return to my original questions. Can the municipality and conventional participation in it respond purposively to anarchist ideals, values, goals and praxis? If so, can it contribute to the development of anarchism, insofar as anarchists might incorporate a municipal expedient into their praxis? I deal with these questions within the framework I have stipulated at the beginning of this study, which includes the bracketing of several adversarial perspectives, and a focus on three constitutive themes: communality beyond the municipality, empowering participation and associative voluntariness. These are indefeasible elements of self-governance. I must examine, then, the extent to which self-governance can be realised within and through the municipality in ways which otherwise would not be obtained. Conversely, the extent to which the municipality organises and perhaps narrows self-governance through restrictive procedures and institutions must be confronted. It is here that the municipality and anarchism limit each other as adversarial political realities. If no accommodation can be reached, they will remain mutually antagonistic.

My immediate perspective is narrower than the scope of possible anarchist praxis within the municipality. I am considering at this juncture its specifically political dimensions. Even if my project fails to embed the municipality and anarchism within each other, there remains the potentiality of anarchism to pursue non-municipal modes of self-governance within the region administered by it, potentially prefiguring parallel social structures as an alternative to it and the statist system of which it is a part. Hopefully, this can be done in any case. I shall address this matter in the following chapter. My focus on some political aspects, narrowly defined as the procedures and institutions for preparing, implementing and assessing public policy decisions, demands a rather more precise interrogation of anarchist thought and praxis, with specific attention to the contingencies individual anarchists may encounter in a municipal expedient. Perhaps I beg the question of whether such an expedient is a valid praxis of an anarchist ethics. Walford thinks not, but I expect more of it than he (Walford 1991, 9– 10). It is a fact of my situation.