Anarchistes Anarchistes
  - (1996) Procès Marini
  - (1996) Quatre de Cordoba
  - (2001) Quatre de Luras
  - (2003) Opération "Black-Out"
  - (2003) Quatre de Valence
  - (2003) Six de Barcelone
  - (2004 - 2005) Opération Cervantes
  - (2004) Enquête sur les COR
  - (2004) Quatre de Aachen
  - (2005) Opération "Nottetempo"
  - (2005) Opération Fraria
  - (2006) Emeutes Forum Social Européen d’Athènes
  - (2006) Operation "Comitato Liberazione Sardegna"
  - (2006) Opération du 9 Février
  - (2006) Opération du Quatre Mai
  - Anonima Sarda Anarchici Insurrezionalista
  - Autres
  - Azione Rivoluzionaria Anticapitalista
  - Brigadas de la Cólera
  - Brigata 20 luglio
  - Cellule Armate per la Solidarietà Internazionale
  - Cellule contro il Capitale, il Carcere, i suoi Carcerieri e le sue Celle
  - Cellule Insorgenti Metropolitane
  - Cooperativa Artigiana Fuoco e Affini (occasionalmente spettacolare)
  - Federazione Anarchica Informale
  - Fuerzas Autonómas y Destructivas León Czolgosz
  - Individus
  - Justice Anti-Etat
  - Narodnaja Volja
  - Nucleo Rivoluzionario Horst Fantazzini
  - Solidarietà Internazionale

Anti-Fascistes Anti-Fascistes
  - Pedro José Veiga Luis Pedro
  - Stuart Durkin
  - Thomas Meyer-Falk
  - Tomek Wilkoszewski
  - Volkert Van Der Graaf

Anti-Guerres Anti-Guerres
  - Barbara Smedema
  - Novaya Revolutsionaya Alternativa

Anti-Impérialistes Anti-Impérialistes
  - Action Révolutionnaire Populaire
  - Armed Resistance Unit
  - Comando Amazónico Revolucionario
  - Comando Popular Revolucionario - La Patria es Primero
  - Comandos Autonomos Anticapitalistas
  - Fraction Armée Révolutionnaire Libanaise
  - Front Armé Anti-Japonais d’Asie du Sud
  - Front Révolutionnaire de Libération du Peuple (DHKC)
  - Grupos de Combatientes Populares
  - Individus
  - Lutte Populaire Révolutionnaire (ELA)
  - Lutte Révolutionnaire (LA)
  - Movimiento de Accion Popular Unitario Lautaro
  - Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru
  - Movimiento Todos por la Patria
  - Organisation Révolutionnaire du 17 Novembre (17N)
  - Revolutionary Armed Task Force
  - Revolutionären Zellen
  - Symbionese Liberation Army
  - United Freedom Front

Communistes Communistes
  - Action Directe
  - Affiche Rouge
  - Armée Rouge Japonaise
  - Brigate Rosse
  - Brigate Rosse - Partito Comunista Combattente
  - Cellule di Offensiva Rivoluzionaria
  - Comando Jaramillista Morelense 23 de Mayo
  - Comando Justiciero 28 de Junio
  - Comunisti Organizzati per la Liberazione Proletaria
  - Ejército Popular Revolucionario
  - Ejército Revolucionario Popular Insurgente
  - Ejército Villista Revolucionario del Pueblo
  - Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias del Pueblo
  - Grupos de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre
  - Individus
  - Ligue Marxiste-Léniniste de Propagande Armée (MLSPB)
  - May 19 Communist Organization
  - MLKP / Forces Armées des Pauvres et Opprimés (FESK)
  - Nuclei Armati per il Comunismo - Formazioni Comuniste Combattent
  - Nuclei di Iniziativa Proletaria Rivoluzionaria
  - Nuclei Proletari per il Comunismo
  - Nucleo Proletario Rivoluzionario
  - Parti Communiste des Travailleurs de Turquie / Léniniste (TKEP/L)
  - Parti Communiste Ouvrier de Turquie (TKIP)
  - Parti-Front Populaire de Libération de la Turquie/Avant-garde Révolutionnaire du Peuple (THKP-C/HDÖ)
  - Proletari Armati per il Comunismo
  - Rote Armee Fraktion
  - Tendencia Democrática Revolucionaria
  - Union des Communistes Révolutionnaires de Turquie (TIKB)
  - Unione dei Comunisti Combattenti

Environnementalistes Environnementalistes
  - Anti OGM
  - Anti-Nucléaires
  - Bio-Technologies
  - Earth Liberation Front
  - Etats-Unis
  - Lutte contre le TAV
  - Marco Camenisch
  - Solidarios con Itoitz (Espagne)

Libération animale Libération animale
  - Animal Liberation Front (ALF)
  - Campagne contre Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS)
  - Peter Young

Libération Nationale Libération Nationale
  - Afro-Américain
  - Amérindien
  - Assam
  - Balouchte
  - Basque
  - Breton
  - Catalan
  - Chiapas
  - Corse
  - Galicien
  - Irlandais
  - Karen
  - Kurde
  - Mapuche
  - Palestinien
  - Papou
  - Porto-Ricain
  - Sarde
  - Tamoul
  - Touareg

Luttes & Prison Luttes & Prison
  - Belgique
  - Contre les FIES
  - Contre les type F (Turquie)
  - Journée Internationale du Révolutionnaire Prisonnier
  - Moulins-Yzeure (24 novembre 2003)
  - Mutinerie de Clairvaux (16 avril 2003)

Manifs & Contre-Sommet(s) Manifs & Contre-Sommet(s)
  - Manifestations anti-CPE (Mars 2006)
  - Sommet de l’Union Européenne de Laeken (14 décembre 2001)
  - Sommet du G8 à Gênes en juillet 2001
  - Sommet européen de Thessalonique (Juin 2003)

Maoistes Maoistes
  - Parti Communiste de l’Inde - Maoïste
  - Parti Communiste des Philippines
  - Parti Communiste du Népal (Maoïste)
  - Parti Communiste du Pérou
  - Parti Communiste Maoïste (MKP)
  - Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party

Répression Répression
  - Allemagne
  - Belgique
  - Espagne
  - France
  - Italie
  - Suisse

Sabotages & Actions Sabotages & Actions
Présentation de l'APAAPA ?


afficher une version imprimable de cet article Imprimer l'article

The New Plantation (21 novembre 1996) [En Anglais]

The New Plantation

The U.S. ruling class will need to take drastic measures in order to maintain its hegemony in a rapidly changing social paradigm. In the new world order, the ideological concerns that previously drove the capitalist ruling class to buy social and labor peace and relative harmony at home with a comparatively generous social contract and high living standards no longer hold sway. Capitalismo is rampant globally and is seeking to eliminate the premium between the $21,000 per capita first world average annual income and the $1,000 average in the rest of the world. Bringing the $1,000 up to the $21,000 would entail an increase in the use of resources by a factor of like 36 in the next 50 years, so it cannot happen : social and technical considerations aside, we would all be dead of the pollution before it even got close. Hence, the $21,000 will have to be depressed. Absent revolution, it will not be reduced at the expense of the ruling class and its henchpeople. The have lesses and nots will be further impoverished by structural economic machinations. Verily, this decline has been in progress for the last two decades. People, of course, will buck their impoverishment. Losing what one has is more likely to breed resistance than not getting what one wants. Thus, the ruling class will try to create a draconian apparatus of repression capable of preventing the emergence of an insurgence. Prevailing social attitudes and the availability of information will preclude traditional methods of torture and mass murder in the short term- and they have rarely proven long-term effective in any event.

Prisons, therefore, will be the strategic center of this apparatus of repression. With them, the ruling class will seek to control absolutely the small percentage of the population crucial to igniting and sustaining a majority revolution. Prisons are and will be used to criminalize nascent resistance movements in an effort to forestall and limit their growth. At the same time, the ruling class will use prisons to portray its agencies of repression as fulfilling a social necessity in protecting the community from "criminals." Further, opposition organizations and plans that may have taken years to develop can be destroyed by even the temporary removal of relatively few key people, especially to distant prisons where communication is limited and controlled. That avoids the political costs of making martyrs. Imprisonment also serves as a threat that will deter a certain proportion of adherents to the theory of resistance from its practice. And in the closely controlled and monitored environment of prison, the ruling class will seek to keep a finger on the pulse of its opposition movements as well as experiment on their intellectual and emotional underpinnings. In short, imprisonment will be increasingly used as an instrument of social control, of counterinsurgency.

Within the prison function of the repressive apparatus, prisoncrats and their ideological masters have several particular interests. These can be substantially served by prison labor. One is defraying the costs of maintenance and expansion. At present, anti-crime/guns/drugs/terrorism hysteria whipped up by the media in its public opinion manufacturing role still allows financing the apparatus and its war on civil liberties from the public trough. That means of financing, however, is already showing signs of strain ; its growth will be increasingly difficult to sustain as the competition for public money intensifies and people begin to perceive the apparatus as ineffective and/or operating contrary to their interests. Prison labor has long reduced operation costs, and the prisonocracy will undoubtedly be compel led to rely more heavily on it in the future. Since day-to-day internal operations of most prisons are already handled extensively by prisoner labor, and prisoncrats are loath to surrender too much direct control of their facilities to prisoners, expansion of industrial operations producing goods for external sale is the most likely way the burden of imprisonment costs will be shifted more onto prisoners. Sale of prison labor outside prisons will be unlikely to catch on much due to security concerns, official desire for secrecy, and resistance by outside labor, recent hoopla about chain gangs notwithstanding.

The expansion of prisoner labor exploitation cannot continue to the point of making the apparatus profitable, though. If the current ratio of roughly $80 billion spent annually on "criminal justice" to about 1.6 million prisoners holds, each prisoner would have to produce more than $50, 000 in yearly profits--an impossibility. Prison labor is predominantly unskilled, and even at prison wages faces competition from the third world and domestic sweat shops. That makes it low return, especially given the cost of maintaining even unpaid prisoners. Beyond that, many prisoners will be unable to participate in profitable, long-term industrial operations. Pretrial detainees, mentally and physically incapable, aged, resistive, locked-down, internal operations workers and many county Jail and juvenile prisoners will not make it into the profit-seeking prison workforce. And capital expansion of secure prison factories will reach a point of diminishing returns before facilities start to (and maybe can) be built primarily to exploit incarcerated labor. Apparatus policy makers recognize these realities and so are not looking at prison labor as a source of net income. Similarly, private capitalism does not look at prison labor as a potential vehicle to wring large scale profits from the super-exploitation of prisoners. That potential lies more with outside workers. The product of an unskilled labor pool even twice current prisoner numbers would still represent small profit potential in an economy with an official workforce of around 130 million.

To be sure, prison labor is kept artificially low wage and may eventually be paid only in conditions of confinement. Support of the prisoners--food, health care, housing, clothing, etc.--is borne by the public. Along with prisoner labor, public facilities are sometimes and will undoubtedly increasingly be given to exploiters of the labor at reduced or no cost, increasing the business subsidy. In this respect, the exploitation of convict labor will more and more become a scam analogous to the exploitation of third world labor : Lobbyists induce U. S. politicians to take money from taxpayers and social services recipients to finance "friendly" dictatorial regimes with military and foreign aid. These grateful "allies" can then Jail, terrorize, and kill unionists or other "pinkos" whose social agenda is counter to profit maximization as well as relax environmental and other business regulations. Thus is created a "business friendly" climate in which the corporations for whom the lobbyists and politicians work can build cheap, polluting, unsafe factories to exploit workers for sub-subsistence wages in order to export huge profits. This cozy arrangement is paid for by the same people these super-exploited workers replace. The case is similar with prisons. Politicians take public money to build grotesquely expensive prisons and hire porcine persons to fill and staff them. In the name of fighting crime, the prisoners are prevented from any form of organization, denied all bargaining rights. exempted from anti-slavery laws, and punished in a variety of ways for performance deemed inadequate. However, the main immediate and projected private profit from the construction binge will allow continued and greater exploitation of outside workers. The super-exploitation of the small captive labor pool in prisons is only incidental, a minor perk for a few favored mini-capitalists, given the mobility of capital.

Convict labor may thus enrich a few capitalists with the right connections, even if it cannot yield profits for that class and the system as a whole. But that enrichment is not the point. At present, the private sale of prison labor is limited and is even illegal in some jurisdictions. Production is primarily for state and federal agencies. But this is changing because the benefits for bourgeois capitalism of creating a third world labor force within the first world transcend both defraying the cost of the apparatus (which could be accomplished through replacement of street workers in production for government only) and providing profits to a few capitalists. The potential exists to use prison labor to depress wages and undermine labor organization in specific areas and industries. Prisoners can be used as strike breakers. Prison labor can be made selectively available to pressure localities into making work rule, health and safety, tax, environmental, and other concessions to business. Progressive alternative economic endeavors can be undercut the same way. Further, dangerous precedents regarding workplace rights are set regarding prisoners that can be translated outside on pretexts such as that riots, social upheavals, "emergencies," etc., are similarly hazardous environments. Hence, increased industrialization and work requirements imposed on prisoners pose a threat much more serious than merely taking a few jobs outside workers would otherwise perform. Many people are duped by the facade that such forced work is justified by being socially and fiscally responsible punishment and training. Anyone familiar with the current conduct of prison industrial operations will recognize the fallacy of these arguments and the irresponsibility of present practice with respect to "corrections." That leaves ulterior motives behind officialdom’s infatuation with neo-slavery.

Prisoncrats have an additional interest in maintaining control of their gulags, which can be facilitated by manipulation of prisoner pay, fob assignments, and working conditions. Aside from the benefits of cheap janitorial, plumbing, electrical, culinary, repair, etc., services, work keeps prisoners occupied and under closer supervision. Prisoner hands and intellect absorbed in assigned tasks are not absorbed in activities "threatening to the secure and orderly operation of the institution," at least while working. For at least part of each day, prisoner movement in "open" prisons is restricted by work, and prisoners are under the more direct scrutiny of work detail supervisors. This incidentally reduces the load on cell block and other guards, who then can be shaking down and otherwise harassing. Prisoners perceived as particularly problematic because they are escape inclined, litigious, organizers, etc., are more likely to be given all-day Jobs that are difficult to shirk and so soak up a lot of time that could otherwise be devoted to activities (legal or not) guards find objectionable. In prisons where everyone without a medical excuse is required to work, most prisoners are permitted to seek Jobs that best meet their needs and competencies from the narrow range of Jobs available. Some prisons do not have enough Jobs to go around, and non-working prisoners in such places are frequently allowed fewer privileges and do more cell time than workers.

Prisoners, work needs and desires differ markedly : some seek to maximize "free" time to devote to things they find more important ; some seek validation and a feeling of self-worth ; some need help in passing time ; some want access to things like food, typewriters, tools ; and others want to earn money Prisons have their own economies. Prisoners who have Jobs that make them comfortable under the circumstances are more likely to avoid trouble that may not only incur disciplinary sanctions, but might also lose them their comfortable "program." Prisoners seeking a particular Job and the attendant situation are likely to behave similarly and/or seek good work reports to facilitate changing Jobs, promotions, raises, etc. Some prisoners even act in unprincipled ways like ratting on others toward these ends. The benes are the carrot ; the stick is possible assignment to an onerous Job. Where work itself is scarce, these results are enhanced. Prisoncrats manipulate all of them to their full advantage in controlling and experimenting upon the prison community.

Manipulation of prison labor also contributes to prisons’ role as an instrument of control on the outside. Prison might not seem much of a threat to people for whom hunger, homelessness, victimization, disease, repression, and desperation are frequent realities. People whose deteriorating communites and prospects can make Bosnia seem a resort are unlikely to be deterred from the opportunities of either conscious or unconscious rebellion by the chance of imprisonment -- a risk that may seem an opportunity in comparison to legal lives. For this reason, the apparatus must make conditions of confinement regress along with outside living standards. Forced labor under super exploitive conditions -- objective slavery -- is one way to do that.

The extent to which prisoncrat interests--cost control and prisoner control--predominate varies between jurisdictions. In some places, cost containment (and opportunities for graft) is the primary function of prison labor ; in others, it is more control and manipulation of the prison population. Increasingly, however, the exploitation of prisoner workers appears to have an experimental function as well. As far back as 1961, the notorious Dr. Ed Schein was advocating experimenting on prisoners with brainwashing techniques. At the same time, then U.S. Bureau-of Prisons (BOP) Director James Bennett, who held that post for 29 years, was exhorting his minions to take advantage of their control over prisoners, lives to experiment generally upon them and to report back the results. Experimentation thus seems to have been in large part behind the first control unit and the eventual descent of the U.S. Penitentiary (USP) at Marion, IL, into the first whole-prison control unit. Though prisoners in the federal system have long been required to work, control-unitized Marion was the first federal prison to introduce objective slavery into for-profit industrial operations. Since then, others have followed suit.

Prisons in many respects are microcosms of the larger society, models in which officialdom has an unprecedented degree of control over captive populations. Since the purpose of prisons is first and foremost to control the outside population, it would be foolish to assume the experimental possibilities/actualities would be limited to developing information for use against inside populations. Prison work related machinations were a large part of the mechanism by which the BOP and USP Marion administrations manufactured the conditions used to justify permanent lockdown of the entire prison. Such changes in the nature and extent of exploitation can also have other purposes : the generation of intelligence and techniques that can be translated to other prisons and to the outside community. Prisoncrats and their capitalist masters cannot hope to make prison labor pay the full cost of their repressive apparatus or even incarceration alone. They can, however, increase their return by the experimental use of prisons in determining how best to exploit and control outside labor in the new world order paradigm. Custodial assignments of prisoners to industrial operation (i.e., objective slavery for alleged "security" reasons) taking precedence over profit motivated ones strongly suggest the value of this return.

Outside workers are being made more like prisoners in their attitudes toward work as the class contradiction in society becomes sharper, work relations become more adversarial, and worker power and rights decline. Identification with corporate entities and trade/profession is being eroded as management continues to attack labor’s gains of the last century and work becomes more casual. Exploiters will want to know how to keep people working and profitable while minimizing the costs of repression. They will want to know what levels of employment and total remuneration going into a community are sufficient to keep it pacified but not enough to make it strong enough to resist its exploitation and oppression successfully. The correct proportions of carrot and stick to avoid instability is valuable information. The ruling class will also want to know how to precipitate worker actions, strikes, demos, riots, etc., prematurely or forestall them until "the" moment is gone so it can more easily disrupt labor resistance and reap political advantage. Failed experiments or attempts to acquire this information outside are more likely to expose the experimentation, burn political capital, and risk aggravating rather than quelling their target rebellion. Figuring out how prisoners, probably the most resistive labor force both because of the clarity of the contradiction between exploiter and exploited and a demonstrated inclination to buck an unsatisfactory situation, can be most cost-effectively exploited can go a long way in this regard.

The growing use of objective slavery and deterioration of prison conditions further reveals this experimental connection. Marion, for example, requires all prisoners to work in a little Unicor (federal prison industries) facility as a condition for transfer out of that lockdown prison. Something similar has been instituted at the new administrative maximum dungeon--ADX--at Florence, CO. Considering the approximately $100 per day per prisoner at Marion and with only a small percentage of the prisoners working, the profitability of this work is not the issue. The issue is more how and how well these prisoners (and those at ADX) who the BOP bills as "the worst of the worst" can be pressured into performing Unicor tasks. The forced labor at USP Leavenworth is another indication of this experimentation. Obviously, the profitability of such prisoners’ work is less than that of those who see such work as a privilege. Contrary to old but standing policy, custodial personnel make these assignments over the objections of Unicor personnel. Since custody has a variety of other ways to more securely control even the most problematic prisoners, and factory work carries its own risks such as access to tools and materials, this new ascendancy of custody in work relations supports the existence of ulterior motives of social experimentation in this slavery.

Among other things the agencies of exploitation and oppression would like to know are the following : Can coerced workers (be they prisoners, probationers, victims of electronic monitoring or labor requirement regulations, or even the economically coerced, like debtors, payers of fines and restitution, tax protesters, or Just poor) be integrated into a consensual workforce ? How can such workers be best motivated ? Is there a critical number of "rabble rousers" that must be present to destabilize control and/or productivity ? Will coerced workers be socialized by the consensual into similar work patterns, or vice versa ? What percentage of coerced workers will actively "buck," and will they subvert others ? How will the presence of slaves affect the dynamics of the workplace, both among and between management and labor ? Can subjection to the rigors of the workplace diminish objectionable behavior beyond the workplace and to what extent ? Can coerced workers be bought ? Etc. The answers to all these questions and their permutations relative to prisoners will not only facilitate the use of inside labor, they can also be translated to outside workers. Outside workers’ compensation has been decreasing, a trend that will continue, decreasing the cost advantage of prisoners. Prison slaves do require a degree of capital investment in the costs of "acquiring" them (cost of predicate acts, arrest, prosecution, housing, etc.). Nor does the present political climate allow them to be denied at least some semblance of health care, food, clothing, shelter, and at least their captors must be paid. While some states make prisoners work for no pay, most proffer some pittance for performance.

The foregoing is not intended to suggest any grand conspiracy theory or even an oligarchy of lesser ones. The absence of such a conspiracy does not mean elements of the apparatus--with or without direction of their ruling class masters, who may act synergistically, tacitly, coincidentally, and/or deliberately in concert--do not collude in furtherance of their interests, Just that the collusion is more accidental, incidental, or ad hoc than strategy Instead of a conspiracy or conspiracies, the connivance of the various elements of the apparatus--indeed, the behavior of the ruling class generally--is part of the dynamic of late capitalism. Conditions drive individual members of the capitalist ruling class to conscious and unconscious actions that will preserve their individual and collective position and power more as the unfolding of a natural law of social dynamics--like all actions have reactions. Prevailing conditions will virtually rule out some class choices and greatly increase the probability of others. The use of prison labor--verily, the totality of prisons generally--as an experimental laboratory is an adaptive choice from the ruling class perspective. This use occurs more, and more consciously, in some jurisdictions than in others, reflecting conditions confronting, resources available to, and sophistication of local elites. In North Dakota, for example, the social contradictions are not nearly so sharply drawn as in, say, Washington, DC. The incarceration rate in North Dakota was around 80 per 100,000 population versus about 1600 in DC in 1991, and the vertical development of the prisonocracy is much greater in the latter.

Responding to the growing exploitation of prison labor, particularly through objective slavery, demands many of the same tactics street labor employed in times past and needs to resurrect. In a sense, al l work for the apparatus of repression by prisoners is collaboration. At present, virtually all of it goes to operating prisons and defraying the costs of the apparatus and providing information. Part of that apparatus is the police armies of occupation it maintains in poor and oppressed communities to wage class war by defending the exploitation of the majority by the minority. But so it goes on the streets where workers’ surplus value goes to taxes and corporate profits used to finance their oppression. Accordingly, reality dictates that subjective analysis be applied to prison work in determining what is and is not collaboration, what objective collaboration is Justified by the freedom derived from it, and what is the most principled resistance. The analysis will always be subjective because conditions, time, and place substantially influence what is, on balance, appropriate.

At present, the best response to objective slavery is to be a bad slave. "Laying down" in the hole on the theory that prison work or some aspect thereof (like the factory as opposed to the kitchen) is always inappropriate is an abdication of the responsibility to struggle within the community in which one finds oneself. Since so few people are presently inclined to buck thusly, it is also often seen as "checking in," which tends to confer "lame" status on the idea of resistance. People should get slammed for what they did, not what they didn’t do. Refusing to "program" in such isolation also helps the swine make their threat of extended lockdown for work resistance look real. It would be different if there were enough people to plug up the SHUs. Better than laying down for whatever illusory statement value it might have is to make pressing prisoners into industrial operations unprofitable by any and all means available. Better it is to keep our priorities straight.

The ruling class will increasingly rely on imprisonment to maintain its hegemony in society at large. Manipulation of prisoner labor fulfills several important functions in making prisons valuable instruments of social control. It defrays the costs of incarceration by shifting them more onto the incarcerated. It helps control prisoners by illegitimate means. It deteriorates prison conditions toward making prison a greater threat to the potentially rebellious outside. And it provides experimental data that can be useful in exploiting and controlling outside communities. All of these results are anti-democratic. None of them are consistent with the goal of reducing crime in a free society. Artificially depressing the cost of incarceration makes it likely to be overused at the expense of more effective alternatives. Making prison labor a political blackjack diminishes the extent to which it can resocialize prisoners who need it. Making labor a Machiavellian competition for personal advantage is de-socializing. Using labor conditions as a threat is socially counterproductive and alienating of the threatened. And nothing needs to be said about a system that uses institutions intended to serve the people as weapons to enslave them. Something needs to be done about it.

Bill Dunne

November 21, 1996, U.S. Penitentiary, Marion IL


Précédent Haut de page Suivant