Richard Coward and Frances Fox Piven have spent a large part of the last dozen years struggling to develop a realistic strategy to achieve social goals, and to a large extent, we feel, have avoided the pitfalls mentioned above. They discuss in their books-Poor People's Movements, The Politics of Turmoil and Regulating the Poor-and in their numerous articles, many of the questions we're struggling to answer. Since we share some of their ideas and concerns, we were interested in exploring their criticisms of Left thinking. Of particular interest to us is their skepticism about the value of both mass-based organizations and the use of an electoral politics strategy to achieve radical social goals. So. we decided to interview these well-known, controversial, interesting people.

The interviewers are Stephen Amberg, Ann Kotell and Paula Rayman.

-Editor

SA: In Poor People's Movements and elsewhere you support the idea and stress the necessary spontaneity of poor people's movements against would-be political leaders. You've also argued against New Left and anarchist thinking while insisting upon a material analysis of strategy. What is your conception of social movements which reconcile these positions?

FFP: I think that we've often been accused of worshipping spontaneity, and that's misleading. The accusation arises out of our insistence on searching for the actual possibilities for mobilization that will arise within the experience and the situation of poor people, in contrast to a frequent Left emphasis on correct organizational forms. But the term spontaneous is misleading because we think that mobilizations, when they occur, are determined events. They are determined by the situations people experience and their interpretations of them. It is the situations that people find themselves in, and the opportunities for action that emerge in those situations, that we think should be analyzed. What is called our emphasis on spontaneity really is an emphasis on an analysis of the actual possibilities for protest mobilization that exist for people in their situation.

RC: I think that the issue of spontaneity is entirely misplaced. We say that mass protest wells up out of certain institutional conditions which generate high levels of anger, indignation and disaffecton with the legitimacy of the social system. And in that sense it is.socially determined. It's not just a spontaneous event that occurs out of the blue. The issue of spontaneity really arises at a different juncture. It arises at the point where potential leaders, organizers, are confronted by this welling up, this bursting forth of new political energy among the masses of people, whether industrial workers of the 1930s or the blacks of the post-World War II period. The issue is how organizers and leaders approach that situation. They can take the traditional path, they can try to harness it, channel it, fashion, shape it, form it into mass-based bureaucratic membership organizations. It was that which we took issue with. We tried to raise the question of whether there were other strategies for channeling and harnessing this energy that would be more effective. We point, for example, to experiences of the civil rights movement in the American South. We pointed out that the organizers who participated in that movement, whether in SNCC, or CORE or SCLC, did not emphasize building mass membership bureaucratic organizations. They employed what we called in Poor People's Movements the tactic of concerted mobilization. They tried to move with this mass of energy, and tried to enlarge and buttress it rather than to turn it toward bureaucratic organization. And I think one can see the same type of concerted mobilization in a variety of other movements that we've seen in recent years. The environmental, antinuclear, and anti-war movements-they've all emphasized the mobilization of great numbers of people for demonstrations, for example. So. the issue for us was organization versus the natural ways in which people are sometimes led to respond as a consequence of the social conditions that confront them.

SA: After the wave passes and the conditions of that situation pass, are there no possibilities for poor people? Is it possible for poor people to win things cumulatively on a permanent basis?

RC: We tend to think not. Our reading of the history of poor people's protests is that they tend to be episodic. They tend to arise out of particular convergences of various institutional forces which generate anger and indignation and cause people to rise up in the streets. But even as that process is initiated it sets in motion other forces in the society which eventually tend to undermine and to restore some measure of equilibrium. We don't know of any historical examples of mass-based organizations that outlived those periods of turbulence, other than the labor movement. And that's a special case. If you look at other categories of people who have been turbulent it is very difficult to motivate them to any kind of action in periods of quiescence. That led us to the conclusion that what's done during the periods of mass unrest is itself the crucial question, not what can be done between periods of mass unrest.

AK: Have you noticed that some tactics people use during periods of mass unrest are more successful than other tactics? Can you isolate certain tactics or strategies and say: these have tended historically to create larger, more positive social movements?

FFP: There are two issues. One has to do with the forms of defiance that are available to people, with whether or not they act to withdraw the cooperation that they otherwise offer to important institutions in the society. It is there that the core of their power resides. So the first issue has to do with understanding and identifying the institutional position of different groups, trying to analyze the kind of power that is available to them if they were to become defiant. This will vary from one group to another.

The second issue has to do with the kinds of movement action that seem to characterize the rising crest of a movement in contrast with kinds of action that tend to be imposed by elements of leadership that are preoccupied with forming stable, mass-based membership bureaucracies. Within the history of any movement you can distinguish between the exercise of mass defiance as people acquire the capacity and the motive to do so, and the form of action that tends to be imposed by leaders who become preoccupied with organization building and making connections with elites. In the labor movement you can distinguish between the rank and file strikes which characterized the upsurge of the movement and the preoccupation of CIO leadership with preventing strikes after 1937 or even before. They thought continued strikes would jeopardize the organization, and they would have, because the crucial condition attached to unionization was the prohibition of strikes, a condition intended to prevent spontaneous stoppage.

Both issues are very important. The first has to do with forms of defiance that are available to people given their situation, given the interdependencies that exist between them and the institutions of the society. What leverage do they have? And the second issue has to do with the different kinds of movement action that occur within the history of any particular movement as a consequence of the emergence of different influences, the first influence being the welling forth of defiance and the second being the preoccupation with organization building and electoral effectiveness that tends to become dominant as a consequence both of leadership doctrine, and the interest of elites in supporting that doctrine.

AK: Given what you've already said, I think you would say the women's movement is on the right track because they're not out to build anything huge or bureaucratic, but are concentrating on expressing themselves and changing their own lives. Do you feel the women's movement possesses the potential for bringing about a broad-based social change?

FFP: Not as it now exists. I think you're correct that there was a tendency in the women's movement that was not organizational. The transforming power of the consciousness-raising group on the lives of better educated women was not organizational. On the other hand, there are also elements of the women's movements which are preoccupied precisely with organizational and electoral politics, particularly with ERA and anti-ERA. However, the difficulties of the women's movement at this stage don't arise primarily because of its organizational form. They arise because of the character of its base. The movement has divided women of different classes, interests and ideology. In fact, the women's movement has helped to create a broad-based, authentically popular movement which is very hostile to the women's movement: the pro-life movement.

AK: Do you see this as a tactic on the part of the patriarchy to divide women in the classic way movements are usually divided, where people are set up to work against one another?

FFP: The patriarchy, the Catholic hierarchy particularly, is certainly involved. But that doesn't explain the large number of women who feel the issues of the women's movement are not their issues. They see the movement as threatening to them. Many women don't have the opportunities of better educated women. They don't see forfeiting the grace of motherhood as a gain at all. They don't see going out and working just like men as particularly attractive, because the men they know collect garbage or work in the mines. So, in a way all women, or women in both movements, are responding to the erosion of the traditional feminine role in the family. The family is changing. But, for lower middle class and working class women that has not been accompanied by the availability of opportunities to enter into more prestigious occupations. For lower middle class and working class women, the erosion of the family is threatening. The only thing they can do is waitressing or something of that sort. They've tended to cling to whatever grace and respect their families afforded them.

AK: What do you think people can do to combat that? Do you see this response as such a broad-based popular movement that there's nothing effective we can do at the present time?

FR: The women's movement could take up the issues that are central in the lives of these women. ERA doesn't mean anything to most women. It's ominous and threatening because it suggests their protections will be taken away. NOW has undertaken some litigation for equal pay, but that's really swamped by the other stuff they were doing.

RC: What has struck me is the extraordinary conventionality of the tactics the women's movement has employed. It has relied, as far as one can see, mainly on litigation, on various forms of electoral politics, petitioning, things of that sort. And if there's one point that an analysis of protest movements leads to, it's that these are not tactics that generally yield much. My own feeling is that the movement is much more likely to make progress were it to employ more disruptive tactics, tactics of civil disobedience and so on. We have the recent experience of the civil rights movement as a testimony that this is what it takes to overturn institutional patterns of any kind.

FFP: The women's movement has probably made its greatest gains in an institutional arena where I suspect there's been a lot of defiance-in the home. It's hidden and we can't see it, but I suspect there's been a lot of cracking of roles. Women's roles in the family, at least among better educated women, have changed dramatically.

PR: An historical thought on the tactics of the women's movement. During the early part of the century the women's movement was going after the vote and used militant tactics such as strikes, civil disobedience and hunger fasts. It wasn't a mass movement, it wasn't a great outpouring, but it was a strong minority. They were successful. They were much more successful using those tactics. But the goal was the vote.

AK: Do you think having the vote makes people feel they have a vested interest or power in the system? Do you think that's why movements die as soon as people are enfranchised?

FFP: That's one reason. But you have to treat that sort of critique rather delicately. A critique of a movement because it has the wrong goals. Those goals don't emerge just because somebody said, "Well, this is what we should go after." Goals emerge out of very deeply imprinted understandings that people have of what's wrong with their situation, understandings that also tend to be fostered and encouraged by their interaction with elites. The black movement went after the vote because the most powerful spokespersons in America said that's what you need. And that was also consistent with an American ideology which black people shared. You can't change that easily, and there come times when people are going to go after reforms which you can see will contain the seeds for their co-optation. But that they do so reflects their fundamental understandings, which can't be wished away.

SA: You mentioned earlier that labor was a special case and the situation of poor people as different. Do different class groupings, different strata, have their own goals? Can labor change its situation permanently while others cannot?

RC: The issue to which I was addressing myself when I made that comment was the question of the conditions under which an insurgent group can or cannot form some kind of permanent organizational structure which outlives the period of turbulence. What I intended to convey was that for labor it was possible. For most groups it is not. And the difference is that labor organizations were formed within the context of an institutional structure-the factory system. That structure existed and that structure is permanent. Labor unions could themselves develop permanency by drawing upon various of the resources which the structure of the factory system provided. For example, they could get the automatic dues checkoff. That meant they could collect enormous amounts of money without any organizing input. In what other situation is that possible? Organizers who try to form mass-based organizations outside the labor context are constantly knocking on doors trying to get people to pay their dues. Labor could also gain concessions that put management in the position of having to coerce membership-the closed shop, the union shop. Where else is there a structure that organizes and can draw upon a coerced membership? So in those and in other ways you cannot generalize from the labor experience. The institutional context is a decisive determinant of a variety of features of these movements and certainly a decisive determinant of whether or not the movement can be institutionalized and made permanent.

SA: 1 wonder whether National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) was faced with a similar situation with the family assistance plan. There was a possibility of having a guaranteed income and recognized entitlements that would have changed the structural base. But apparently in the dynamic of mobilization it was far from clear that it would have had these results. That there might be some time when working class organizations could find some common ground with poor people's demands I think is part of what many people still believe.

RC: I don't think the enactment of Nixon's family assistance plan would have affected either the institutionalization of NWRO or facilitated the growth of a cross-class coalition. I think it would have probably helped spell the demise of the movement. There was nothing in the nature of that concession that would have enabled NWRO to become institutionalized.

If you think about the kind of welfare structure that would have been created it's hard to see anything that would have made possible the classic coalition with the working class. It would have nationalized certain decisions to a substantial degree perhaps. But what we argued was not that NWRO should have resisted FAP because of its organizational needs, or that they should have used FAP to set the stage for a new political movement, but that they should have ignored it. Whatever effect NWRO still could have had was at the local level by trying to revive the sorts of defiant actions that had characterized the early years of that movement. What the family assistance plan signaled for NWRO had nothing to do with whether it was good or bad welfare policy. As a matter of fact NWRO had trouble deciding whether it was good or had, but what was always clear from the beginning was that they were going to get involved in it, and they were going to use the occasion of the legislation to make themselves prominent. They also did it because they felt that was the way to go.

RC: NWRO went to Washington. You never saw one of the leaders in a welfare center again. They substituted symbolic resources for a mass base. They had no mass base left nor did they make any concerted effort to try to revive it.

SA: Part of the goals of NWRO was to achieve immediate economic aid and a national income standard. If those goals were achieved they would presumably change the conditions of poor people. They would not be as readily seen as pariahs, the status of poor people would change, which would be a major change.

FFP: There were certain goals that were impossible, precisely because they would have had the reverberations that you predict. It's no doubt true that a decent income maintenance system that allowed people who were not working some degree of self-esteem, and that allowed them a minimally decent income, would change the meaning of poverty. It would change the material condition of the poor and it would also change the meaning of being poor. But that is also probably why it can't happen. A related reason that it can't happen is that then the meaning of low wage work would also change. Low wage work would no longer be enforced by the fact that there was a fate even worse than being a dishwasher in a crummy little restaurant. Or in a similar way, the original Humphrey-Hawkins bill, which would have guaranteed government employment to everyone on demand when unemployment rose above 3 percent, would have had enormous reverberations. It never could happen simply as legislative innovation for that reason. The structural opportunities for reform don't derive simply from our good ideas. When we fix on a reform that will have widespread reverberations, we have to expect that the other side has a capacity for understanding those reverberations. When Senator Long said in the hearings on FAP that "If a family could be guaranteed $1,600 a year in the South, who was going to wash his shirts?", he understood the connection between low wage work and welfare. Just for that reason the structural opportunities for welfare reform are limited.

AK: I've felt for a long time that the electoral strategy is a dead end and that most people who use it in an attempt to affect social change are manipulated by those controlling the system.

RC: The civil rights movement, after winning the vote in '65, left the streets and went into electoral politics. It was a mindblowing transformation that occurred between 1965 and 1970.

There was unwarranted optimism. An illusory optimism about the possibilities of electoral politics. What they had won they had won by protest. Now suddenly they decided they could take on all the economic ills of the black community, its low wages, its lousy housing, its unemployment, these really difficult problems, far more difficult than the winning of political rights, by a much softer conventional sort of political action. It just seemed to us that was a contradiction in terms. Look at what they had to do just to win the vote. Look at the tactics they had to employ. Now they are going to undertake a genuine class struggle, a struggle against various forms of economic deprivation and inequality which were deeply rooted in the American social structure. And how were they going to do it? With votes. It seemed to us incredibly naive. When people say we are pessimistic, I feel quite the opposite. I think we have a certain optimism about the use of non-conventional tactics, and we think that the optimism displayed by those who employ conventional tactics is simply misplaced.

FR: The black leadership that went into electoral politics demonstrated an outward optimism about electoral politics. At least you can say for them they had a certain self-interest in being optimistic because they got elected. Or appointed, or whatever. So it served them well. But in general when the Left calls us pessimistic what they mean-they mean two sorts of things I suppose-is first that we don't talk about how to get total, radical social transformation, how to get socialism. We don't say much about how to do it. We even seem to be saying that the best you can hope for is smallish gains. And I suppose the second dimension of our "pessimism" has to do with the fact that we don't believe in the doctrine of how to get those gains-working class organizations contriving certain formulae about organization and indoctrination. We would say that they're not optimistic, but rather doctrinaire and contemptuous, that they haven't evaluated their own strategy against contemporary experience, and that's mindless! Also, when they dismiss the struggles of the sixties generally, they're contemptuous about the situation of actual people.

RC: I have yet to see a critic of the black movement of the sixties who acknowledges that blacks in the South won an historically important victory. They won a major reduction in the use of terror as the means by which they were controlled. That was the real meaning of the winning of political rights in the South, the right to sit on the previously all-white juries, and so forth. The vote did have some important consequences with respect to the terror question-blacks can vote out terroristic sheriffs and other public officials. Now from our point of view, anytime a group succeeds in weakening the use of terror to control it, it has made a major gain, it's just not to be dismissed.... It may not be utopia, but that doesn't mean it isn't extraordinarily significant. And if you talk to ordinary black people in the South today, that is what they talk about; they don't have to kow-tow nearly as much, they don't live in fear nearly as much; and in their lives, that's an extraordinary gain.

PR: I haven't seen very much mention in your work of the nonviolent movement. Nonviolent organizations tend to be highly decentralized and use mass protest, staying out of electoral politics. You haven't given that very much attention or applause. Is there a reason for you neglecting this movement? It's complementary to a lot of things you're saying, and falls into your perspective more closely than many of the other movements with which you deal.

RC: Do you mean the use of nonviolent civil disobedience?

PR: I'm talking about nonviolence not just in terms of strategy and tactics, but as a movement: it has been a movement in U.S. history. It certainly was an organizing force and very anti-legislative. I see it as the movement which comes closest to fulfilling some of the ideas you put forth.

FFP: That's probably so, but it had to do also with our understanding of the issue of violence, a term which is misunderstood and misused. Violence is a peripheral issue to us. Whether or not a movement is violent has to do more with its strategic opportunities. We are not against violence, in general or in principle. We think that it is not accidental that most popular movements in the U.S. have not been violent, because they've understood their extreme vulnerability, the repression that violence would bring down upon their heads. On the other hand, most popular movements have resulted in violence, and we don't think that's accidental either, but is very much a strategic question. The Southern civil rights movement consistently precipitated violence, and it knew what it was doing. It selected or targeted cities where violence was most likely and did so because it understood that Southern violence would add to their national support.

PR: Do you really think they picked those cities just because the violence there would be most publicly useful?

FFP: Yes, look what they were doing-they were exposing the Southern system before the eyes of the nation, so Washington would have to intervene. Those were the fundamental elements of their strategy.

PR: Perhaps they went to those places where injustice was most systematic, so that the violent confrontation was not the compelling reason to go to these cities.

RC: It depends on which city and which episode. Sometimes the movement massed in certain cities because something boiled up in that city, and they responded to it. That was true in Albany, Georgia, in '61 and '62. But when they picked Birmingham in '63, they did it very deliberately. They knew it was probably the most racist city in the South, with the most repressive police force, and they expected a great deal of bloodshed and arrests.

PR: It seems to me that it is recognized that state violence depends on a highly centralized form of organization, and that it's one of the compelling strategies of violent action to demand a high degree of centralization and to demand a certain kind of organization to perform in a certain way. Nonviolent action in fact is based on a very decentralized view of organization; a very different set of tactics and goals are attached to the nonviolent strategy. What I'm asking is if the kind of things you're suggesting in your writing wouldn't be much more compatible with a nonviolent strategy.

FFP: I don't think a high level of organization and centralization is inherent in violence or nonviolence. What of the numerous occasions in American history when strikers have had the ability to keep out scabs by violent means, with the result that they sometimes won?

PR: No doubt; violence has won sometimes, nonviolence has won sometimes. I think the point is though it's a level of organization, a kind of centralization that's necessary.

FFP: But you can keep out scabs by violent means without a centralized organization. There can be that degree of infrastructure and consensus in the community of workers, and basically that's how miners understand to this day how to keep out scabs. You threaten them. And you shoot them if you have to.

PR: I think the way in which miners have been engaged is a more spontaneous "case" kind of effort.... you've got to think in terms of strategy, especially in the U.S. which is such an inherently violent society. That has to be dealt with in terms of sustained struggle. What we're up against is so sustained, so planned, and we're constantly going through cycles of being stilled and then rising up. How do we get out of that kind of cycle and create a more sustaining culture, without necessarily falling into the pitfalls and becoming highly centralized, doing the kinds of things you have suggested?

FFP: I don't think we can get out of the cycles. Movements set in action the forces that lead to their demise. But we can try to develop a popular culture of rebellion, a culture which carries the memories of earlier struggles. Still, it's hard to develop a popular culture in contemporary America that has any degree of autonomy-the capacity of people to remember their own experience and interpret their own experience has been virtually obliterated by the propaganda forces of modern society. But the Left could try to develop a reservoir of popular experience to keep it intact for people. We think that what the left has really done is to get it all wrong-that the left has developed a series of myths about the past that are consistent with Left doctrines but give people very little credit and also draw the wrong lessons about past experiences. This is true, for example, of the sorts of understandings that are available of what really happened in the 1930s and later struggles. "Well, the CIO went out and organized industrial workers and then the industrial workers were all organized and they were happy ever after!" But it didn't happen that way, even the organizers don't think it happened that way, and the version that is passed down gives workers themselves far too little credit. That's one problem. The other problem is that if you tell it wrong, then people learn the wrong lessons. So, we don't have a big answer, a total solution to the problem of the cyclical pattern of popular struggles. Our only answer is that we could do better in trying to build on past struggles. If you look at the history of struggles by French working people and peasants in the nineteenth century, you can see clearly marked the memories of each struggle on the next. That doesn't happen in the U.S., both because the Left has not cultivated this tradition and because people's capacities for developing their interpretations are being rapidly overtaken by the mass media.

RC: I think another point in the same direction is that a lot of these periods of insurgency by low-income people just pass without being recorded. Take Poor People's Movements, for example. We had a chapter on the unemployed movement in the thirties but practically nothing is written about it. That was only forty years ago, and no historian has really turned to it. Let's take other aspects of insurgency which are really quite dramatic-the breakdown of morale in the armed forces in Vietnam, the fragging and so forth.. One of the reasons that the American military was finally prepared to allow the defeat to be conceded is because they understood that in some important way they had lost control of their own troops. Now that's a phenomenal story-who's going to tell it? Who's going to go around and find those soldiers and interview them and trace the whole process by which morale broke down, how the legitimacy of the war broke down and how their defiance-court martial type defiance-so weakened the American war effort that it was a crucial variable in the equation that led finally to our conceding defeat. Even the draft resistance movement has not been written about much. Or what about the anti-nuclear movement that's going on now? Are we going to get a history of that, or all these episodes just going to be forgotten?

AK: People put up with a lot of oppressive, unhappy situations in their lives that are created for them by authorities of various kinds-in school, in the workplace, from politicians and other "leaders." I think they acquiesce for a variety of reasons: because they can't imagine society could function any other way; because they believe the current way to be the only moral way; because they can't see any other way out; and so forth. I think the key to bringing about a broad-based social change is to help lots of people to start thinking they don't have to put up with all the negative things in their lives; that they can develop and use their personal power; that they can begin to feel they can get together with other people and shape some of their own destinies. Do you look at these issues, and if so, how do you approach them?

FFP: We think that the way in which people acquire that sense of themselves, collectively, is by having a degree of power and acting on whatever power they do have. True, one way of approaching that problem is through political education, where you try to change people's sense of themselves. But we think that people's sense of themselves, the power to control their own destiny, is most thoroughly transformed by militant action.

AK: The most important reason for me in deciding to work with battered women at Transition House was the thought that I would be encouraging women who'd actually left a very oppressive situation and had taken that big first step toward saying, "We're not going to put up with that shit anymore." My work was to help them to cement that step. But I want to find other ways to do that same thing. Do you believe when people accomplish some political goal and have a good feeling about it that they probably go away with the feeling that since they accomplished the one thing they probably can accomplish others?

FFP: It depends a little bit on the spirit in which they accomplish it, their understanding of what it is they're doing while they're doing it. That matters. I don't think that the looting thing a couple of years ago in New York, which no doubt yielded a lot of goods, developed a sense of collective strength and a stronger sense of indignation and so forth. They probably thought of it as hustling, and since hustling is life in those communities anyway, that's not as good as other forms of collective action. On the other hand, there were blacks in the South, who in the entire memory of their people, always had to kow-tow. They confronted their masters and oppressors and they said "no more." That must have changed their sense of themselves forever.

RC: The same point, by contrast, did not hold for the welfare rights movement, because they were dealing with an issue that was morally much more ambiguous, given the American value system. They were asking for the right to be dependent. The civil rights movement was asking for the right to be free, which resonates with American traditions in ways which the right to be dependent does not. There wasn't in the welfare rights movement the same moral spirit, the sense of self-righteousness, that was true of the civil rights movement. There was a problem of moral ambiguity that plagued the welfare rights movement from the first day it was formed.

AK: What do you hope will be the result of people reading your books? Is your priority to help people to see the various opportunities open to them?

RC: One of our main purposes was to try to alter the debate about strategy: To try to undermine the commitment, even among Left leaders and organizers, to electoral politics as the means by which significant changes can be made. Our reading of the history of these movements suggested the contrary. It was only when these movements moved outside the arena of electoral politics to employ militant, disruptive, non-institutional forms of political action, that any chance of winning gains of any kind emerged. So one of our main concerns was to raise a large question of doubt about the use of conventional political channels by groups at the bottom of the society.

FFP: In writing Regulating the Poor, I think our orientation was a little bit different. We were trying to cast welfare in a different light. We were trying to make people see it differently. and at that time part of our audience was the welfare rights movement itself. Our analysis was often considered to be pessimistic, in the sense that we did not hold out much hope for "welfare reform." But we don't consider ourselves to be pessimistic. Do you consider yourself pessimistic, Richard?

RC: It's a difference I think between being starry-eyed and being realistic, rather than being pessimistic and optimistic. Why should I be optimistic about the possibilities for significant gains for oppressed groups through the electoral system if I think the electoral system is really controlled by other and more powerful groups? Why is it pessimistic to say that if people are going to make gains they are going to have to move outside that system and use unconventional channels of political influence? That's not a pessimistic statement. I think it's a realistic statement.