Antonio Negri (1999), Back to the Future: A Portable Document' (trans..Michael Hardt) (first written 1998) in, Josephine Bosma, et al, eds., Readme! Filtered by Nettime. ASCII Culture and the Revenge of Knowledge. New York: Autonomedia, pp. 181-186.

For Antonio Negri, labour has been stripped of its political power. Its power lay its collective form in the factory, and its political forms such as trade unions. His view of proletarians are a 'mass of people that seem formless - proletarians who work on the social terrain, ants that produce wealth through collaboration and continuous cooperation. Really, if we look at things from below, from the world of ants where our lives unfold, we can recognise the incredible productive capacity that these new workers have already acquired.' (1999: 181)

Today the labour force is often an unemployed one; flexible and mobile, sometimes illegal and in a sense 'free' in that labour has been emancipated from the discipline of the factory. Now it is largely immaterial and intellectual labour. Negri argues that the working tool is now one that is embodied, and it is this that creates wealth (1999: 182). Therefore it is life itself that creates wealth and constitutes the tool.