Detoeuf no more belonged behind this particular desk than the job applicant belonged in front of it. It was not that she was a she—legions of women, after all, labored in French factories. Instead, it was because she was a graduate of France’s other elite school, the École normale supérieure—which, like the École polytechnique, had been founded by Napoleon—and had, until recently, taught philosophy to lycée students. Yet, the applicant—who, having long theorized about assembly line labor, now wanted to experience it at firsthand—was hell-bent on finding factory work with or without Detoeuf’s help. Given the applicant’s bad eyesight, crippling migraines, and manual dexterity—she had none—he decided it was better if he helped.

And so, on a frigid December day in 1934, Simone Weil began work at the Alsthom factory on the Rue Lecourbe, the clanking of her stamping press adding to the din of this industrial neighborhood in southwest Paris. That night, on the first page of her “factory journal,” Weil inscribed two epigrams. The first is hers: “Not only should man know what he is making, but if possible he should see how it is used—see how nature is changed by him. Every man’s work should be an object of contemplation for him.” The second, in Greek, is Homer’s: “Much against your will, under pressure of harsh necessity.”

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Simone Weil’s death. Her life was raw and short—she died at the age of 34, perhaps of willed starvation to mark her solidarity with her fellow citizens in occupied France—but her legacy is rich and long. With the posthumous publication of her writings, ranging from her reflections on politics and ethics to theology and faith, Weil now towers as one of the 20th century’s most influential and subversive thinkers. In particular, Weil’s conceptions of necessity and contemplation—couched in her journal’s epigrams but also grounded in her real experiences—remind us why the unique way her thought and life meshed matters more than ever.

The very act of thinking, Weil discovered, was the first casualty of factory work. A few days into her job, she was already reeling from fatigue. Her weariness stemmed less from the physical demands of her job—though they were great—than the unrelenting pressure to meet quotas and the numbing repetitiveness of the work. “The effect of exhaustion,” she wrote, “makes it almost impossible for me to overcome the strongest temptation that this life entails: that of not thinking anymore, which is the one and only way of not suffering from it.”

But despite near-constant migraines and bone-deep exhaustion, Weil did think about this kind of working life. How could she not? As a 10-year-old, she slipped out of her family’s spacious apartment in Paris to join a labor protest she had glimpsed from the window. As a university student, she earned the nickname “the Categorical Imperative in skirts” by way of acknowledging her fierce sense of moral duty. As a lycée teacher in the provincial city of Le Puy, she angered the authorities by protesting on behalf of the shabbily treated workers in the local stone quarry.

Weil’s engagement with the world spilled into her classroom, where she would confront her students with questions like “How many workers’ homes could be built for the price of a luxury liner?” These queries were not distractions from her role as teacher—the great majority of her students passed the baccalaureate, the feared final exam—but its very raison d’être. Weil insisted that humans will be free only when we have “understood the causes of oppression as clearly as we understand the gravity which causes a stone to fall.”

The gravitational pull of factories was as strong as that of dark matter for her. Within the walls of the Alsthom plant—along with two other factories where she subsequently worked—Weil discovered the nature of le malheur, or affliction. The factory distilled the hierarchy and its train of harrowing inequities that structured French society. Her coworkers were, with few exceptions, women. During her first week, Weil knew the names of some like Madame Forestier (whose earned her title by her imperious demeanor), but also identified the nameless ones: the “Tolstoy fan,” the “Woman who gave me a roll,” and the “Mother of the burned kid.”

Even when she failed to learn the names of her coworkers, Weil captured the tragic nature of their lives. There was the drill operator who brought her 9-year-old son to work. When Weil found the boy fending for himself in the changing room, she asked the mother if he was also coming to work. “I wish he were old enough,” the woman replied matter-of-factly. One metal shearer suffering from inflammation in her pelvis could not get a transfer from the presses—work that, Weil wrote, “irrevocably and completely destroyed her reproductive organs.”

The women, Weil quickly found, were subject to the whims of the “big shots”—namely, the foremen. Days after she began at the factory, which made electronic components, Weil was unable to fully control a fly press designed to punch holes into metal boxes. As a result, she botched a full quota of metal components. Mouquet, her foreman, ordered her to redo all the pieces, but in a way that forced her to repeatedly duck her head to avoid the machine’s heavy counterweight. By the time she emptied her box of components, Weil also felt emptied. “I had the idiotic feeling that it wasn’t worth the effort to pay attention to protecting myself.”

On this occasion, Weil’s coworkers signaled their “pity and mute indignation” at what had been done to her. More often, though, the working conditions bred distrust and despair. “In this kind of life,” Weil realized, “those who suffer aren’t able to complain. Others would misunderstand them, perhaps laughed at by others who are not suffering, or thought of as tiresome by yet others who, suffering themselves, have quite enough suffering of their own. Everywhere the same callousness, with few exceptions.” To complain to a supervisor was an invitation for further degradation. “It’s humiliating, since she has no rights at all and is at the mercy of the good will of the foremen, who decide according to her worth as a worker, and in large measure capriciously.”

In effect, the foreman decided Weil’s worth not just as a worker, but also as a human being. Le malheur resulted less from physical suffering than psychological degradation. Ground down by relentless and repetitive physical labor, workers were also shorn of human dignity. Harried by time clocks and hounded by foremen, serving a machine and severed from a real purpose, the workers were quite simply unable to think at all, much less think about resistance or rebellion. Horrified, Weil realized that the factory “makes me forget my real reasons for spending time in the factory.”

Rarely at a loss for words, Weil struggled to explain her state of mind to friends. In her letters, she was often reduced to describing her experience as “inhuman.” But in her journal, she increasingly depicts the condition of workers as “slavery.” You kill yourself, she exclaimed, “with nothing at all to show for it … that corresponds to the effort you put out. In that situation, you really feel you are a slave, humiliated to the very depths of your being.” Before she entered the factory, even the Categorical Imperative in skirts might have raised her eyebrows at such a claim. Once she left the factory, a shaken woman in work clothes had come to see servitude as a near-universal condition.

Affliction, it turns out, is an equal opportunity employer. It is too easy, she warns, to comfort women as victims and condemn men as victimizers. Men no less than women, managers no less than workers, even employers no less than employees are all subject to necessity. All of us are driven, at varying speeds, by physical needs and political creeds, economic imperatives and social interests. None of us, as a consequence, escapes necessity’s gravitational pull. “Human history is simply the history of the servitude which makes men—oppressors and oppressed alike—the playthings of the instruments of domination they themselves have manufactured.”

Oddly, Weil had to be reminded of this point by Detoeuf. In 1936, more than a year after her factory experience, she related to Detoeuf a conversation between two employers she had overheard in a train. Complaining about the strikes then sweeping France, these two “well fed and well dressed” men believed they had everything to lose should the strikers succeed. That workers should demand their rights, Weil marveled, was seen as a “monstrous injustice” by these comfortable owners.

In his reply, Detoeuf agreed that many employers lacked a sense of civic duty and social obligation. Yet, he also suggested that Weil failed to show these employers the same attention she gave to the workers. Leave aside, he asked with restrained irony, “whatever may be rather grotesque and odious in the fact of being portly and well-nourished.” He suggested that if Weil put herself in their place, she would discover that “unless these men were more than human they could hardly think and feel otherwise.” Convinced their material well-being was at risk, they responded as Weil would respond if her mental well-being was threatened. They truly believed that the end of their world—which, for them, was the only world—was nigh. “You must really use your own imagination to try to grasp that these men have not so much imagination as you credit them with. For them, to have nothing more to lose means to have to give up everything that makes up their existence.”

Did Weil concede Detoeuf’s point? Her reply isn’t recorded, but it would be odd had she not, because it happens to be her point, too. The exercise of our imagination or attention is our one defense against the onslaught of necessity. Allowing us to peel back the layers of meaning we impose on the world, attention trains us to see others not as white or black, woman or man, worker or manager, but instead as us. In a word, we come to see the true nature of affliction. To acknowledge the reality of affliction, Weil observed a few years later, “means saying to oneself: ‘I may lose at any moment, through the play of circumstances over which I’ve no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things that are so intimately mine that I consider them as myself.’”

Seventy-five years after Weil’s death, how better to measure her life than by recalling her conception of the world as subjected to necessity, marked by affliction, and starved for our attention. That even Weil could fall short in the work of attention is a happy reminder that few activities are more difficult—or more important—than coming to see someone else as real.

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It sounds distinctively modern—fair trade, sustainably sourced, slave free—all familiar touchstones of ethical capitalism in America today. To many of us, morning coffee just seems more enjoyable when the worker picking the beans earns a living wage; a shrimp cocktail, more palatable when it is not processed by children forced to toil in peeling sheds. When trendy apparel is impossibly cheap, and likely the handiwork of exploited laborers, the conscientious consumer seeks an alternative.

Many Americans assume we’re living in a unique moment for ethical commerce, and witnessing the dawn of moral capitalism. But what seems new is actually a 250-year-old tradition, launched by a small cadre of 18th century religious reformers: Quakers and other evangelical Protestants. For activists in both the United States and Britain, sugar was the conspicuous commodity that crystalized the evils of the age because of its role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was a product, they argued, that ethical consumers should avoid.

Sugar cane, which is native to Asia, had been rare in Europe until the 15th century, when Spanish and Portuguese merchants discovered that it grew well on the Canary Islands and Madeira. Columbus carried cane cuttings to the Caribbean in 1493, and Santo Domingo became the site of the region’s first sugar mill in 1516. But it was Portuguese slave traders who figured out how to really profit from sugar, forcing captive Africans to work on the equatorial islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. The traders reinvested their profits to buy more slaves to grow sugar in Brazil. In the 17th century, the Dutch took over the slavery-fueled Brazilian and Caribbean sugar operations, followed by the British and French a hundred years later.

The sugar trade was lucrative and competitive because Europeans and Americans had gone sweets-mad. British sugar consumption quadrupled during the 18th century. Production in Haiti, a French colony, increased 40 percent from 1760 to 1791. By the last decade of the 1700s, Britain and France each claimed close to 40 percent of the still-growing commercial sugar market. Enabled by slavery by the mid-19th century, 12 million Africans had been forced into the holds of slave ships, about two million dying en route.

Blue glass sugar bowl inscribed in gilt, “East India Sugar Not Made By Slaves,” c. 1820-1830. Image courtesy of The British Museum.

Abolitionists in Britain organized, petitioning Parliament to end the slave trade. Vested interests, however, fought back, marshalling an array of excuses: Slavery was salutary to British wealth and success, slavery was civilizing to lazy Africans, and if Britain didn’t claim slavery’s wealth, a competitor would.

So the Quakers and their allies looked for another strategy—and found it in 1791. The year had been a propitious one for abolition, with a slave revolt breaking out in Haiti and an unsuccessful but attention-grabbing attempt to abolish slavery pushed in Parliament. Against this backdrop, Baptist printer William Fox published An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Utility of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum, urging Englishmen to stop buying sugar on moral grounds. Admired and promoted by Thomas Clarkson, the leading abolitionist in England, Fox’s Address was published in several editions, with a quarter-million copies in print by 1792. Historian Timothy Whelan contends that it was “the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century,” exceeding the reach even of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

In response to Fox’s treatise, some 300,000 consumers, mostly women purchasing household goods, boycotted West Indian sugar—and created the first free produce movement in history. The effort was huge by modern standards, involving 2.8 percent of the British population—and helped turn public opinion against slavery. The abolitionist British poet Robert Southey even penned an anthem for the popular cause, writing in a sonnet: “O ye who at your ease/ Sip the blood-sweeten’d beverage,” not caring whether “beneath the rod/ A sable brother writhes in silent woe.”

Britain banned the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807, but not because of the protests: Passing a ban gave Britain, which was at war with Napoleonic France, a pretext to attack French shipping. After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, British consumers again mobilized. The boycotts of the 1820s were bigger than those of a generation earlier, with perhaps more than half a million consumers—mainly female—participating. Leaders formed a Free Labour Company to source sugars in India, and again the protest was felt in Parliament, which abolished slavery in the British West Indies in 1833.

The idea that ethical demand drives supply soon crossed the Atlantic, but isolated American activists like Cooper struggled to be heard. Quaker Benjamin Lundy opened a “free produce store” in 1820s Baltimore. But as an abolitionist editor who set up a printing press in a slave port, he was deeply unpopular. The shop was burgled and, after discovering that enemies paid a black man to commit the crime, Lundy refused to prosecute.

Leadership of American consumer protests fell to African Americans like New York shopkeeper David Ruggles, who advertised in 1828 that his sugars were “manufactured by free people, not by slaves.” The Colored Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania (CFPS) organized in 1830. It was an African American antislavery organization dedicated to educating consumers about who grew and processed their cotton, sugar, and tobacco. The CFPS was a success, quickly boasting 500 charter members who were able to buy 50-pound bags of free sugar.

African American women became the movement’s leaders. Judith James and Laetitia Rowley led the Colored Female Free Produce Society in 1831, composed of members of Philadelphia’s Bethel Church. They drew on women’s purchasing power to force change. At each of the first five Colored Conventions delegates urged black consumers to buy free. One resolution called on “colored capitalists” to invest in free labor stores, and in 1834 African American businessman William Whipper opened one next to Bethel Church. Lundy, the Baltimore Quaker, praised black women’s efforts and said they should be a model for white female activism.

These consumer movements against slave-grown sugar were swimming against a tide. The federal government propped up U.S. domestic sugar interests with protective tariffs, and Americans’ sweet tooth was even sharper than Britons’. On average, each American ate 12 pounds of the stuff each year in 1830, increasing to 30 pounds by 1860. (Per capita, we consume several times that quantity today.) In a world of cheap sweets, Americans cared less about the provenance of their pies and cookies. Abolitionists shifted their strategy to opposing cotton, the great symbol of American slavery, with retailers pledging to work with slave-free suppliers and abolitionists, once again, promoting free produce as a means to fight slavery.

For all the organizing, the crescendo of the free produce movement in America was scarcely audible. Some five to six thousand people abstained from slave-produced products. As many as fifteen hundred joined free produce societies. One source claims 10 percent of Quakers—10,000 in all—were active abstainers.

Today’s activists carry this older movement’s torch. NGOs like Amnesty International decry the use of forced labor in the consumer electronics business, and scholar-activists like Kevin Bales point out the connections between slavery and environmental degradation. Even U.S. states now facilitate ethical shopping. In 2010, California, the world’s sixth-largest economy, passed the Transparency in Supply Chains Act, which requires large firms to disclose efforts to eradicate slavery and human trafficking among their suppliers. The push led some companies to seek out new sources for slave-free cottons and ethically-farmed food.

But sugar is, to some extent, still bloodstained. It’s been 500 years since the first sugar mill was built in the Dominican Republic, but hundreds of thousands of debt-bound Haitians continue to toil in squalor and poverty in the cane fields earning below-subsistence wages. That certainly looks like modern-day slavery. While the Quaker-inspired fight for “ethical capitalism” continues—both as a goal and as an ideal—crusaders have never fully reformed that sweet symbol.

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Humorous protest is a very sophisticated—and even tricky—tool to deploy against authoritarian regimes. As Hannah Arendt wrote in On Violence: “The greatest enemy of authority … is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.” But laughter has political advantages as well as limitations, as I have discovered while studying its impact in Serbia and in my home country, Thailand.

Serbia offers a striking example of how humor can be used to resist an oppressive government. In the 1990s, this southeastern European nation faced numerous crises stemming from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, including wars with newly independent neighboring countries, international sanctions, surging domestic crime rates, and the fearsome rule of Slobodan Milošević, the president of Serbia and, later, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Many civic groups took to the streets to challenge the rule of Milošević, who retained strong support among rural Serbians. A heavy NATO bombing campaign in 1999 and mounting international pressure had weakened Milošević’s authority.

Members of the United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD) or Red Shirt cheer for news report of the by-election at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. About 200 UDD members took part in the gathering to show their unity and to defy the country’s security act. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

But it took the subversive humor of the Otpor movement (the Serbian word for “resistance”) to finally oust Milošević. Otpor did satirical street theater, parodic protests, and carnivalesque events—all of which were fun and easy to participate in. One of their most famous street skits was “Beating of a Barrel.” In the middle of Belgrade’s busy pedestrian streets, activists placed an empty petrol barrel with an image of Milošević on it. They invited passersby to hit the barrel with a stick they provided. Soon people were lining up to beat the barrel to show their resentment toward the regime. These actions conveyed a critical message to the Serbian public: Milošević was not to be feared, he was no longer legitimate as a leader, and there was a political alternative to him.

As the confrontation escalated, Otpor ratcheted up the ridicule. When the regime baselessly accused Otpor of being a terrorist organization, the activists didn’t respond by defending themselves with words, but instead dressed up in theatrical military uniforms and paraded around toting toy rifles. The crews walked through the streets ignoring traffic signs. Afterward, they proclaimed ironically, “This is a terrorist act because we didn’t obey the traffic sign. This is the kind of terrorists we are.”

Otpor also organized rock concerts and parties (sometimes joined by celebrities) to encourage people across Serbia to imagine a different Serbia without wars, poverty, and political instability. In October 2000, the persistent nonviolent campaigns waged by Otpor and other opposition parties helped remove the weakened Milošević from power. Leading activists from Otpor continued their nonviolent crusades, transferring knowledge of nonviolent protest strategies to other movements in countries such as Ukraine, Georgia, Lebanon, Iran, the Maldives, Burma, and more recently Egypt.

A member of the UDD or Red Shirt puts makeup on her face as a dead person at Lumpini park in Bangkok, Thailand, July 2010. Photo by Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press.

A decade later, humorous tactics showed up in Thailand, an unlikely spot because it’s a place where anti-elite jokes and gossip are considered weapons of “the weak.” But in 2010, a loosely-organized movement emerged that used humor to shake up a society that has been politically and economically dominated by the monarchy, army, and aristocratic elites for decades. Since the early 2000s, an alternative, democratic political party has gained increasing support. It was led by Thaksin Shinawatra, a Thai businessman who served as the country’s prime minister for five and a half years before being overthrown in a 2006 military coup. The party’s supporters, from the rural North and Northeast of Thailand, where inequality hit hardest, are sometimes known as the Red Shirts.

The political establishment saw this as a threat, mobilizing their partisan supporters—who became known as the Yellow Shirts—to the street, increasing the bitter political polarization that still grips Thailand today. In 2010, pro-establishment government forces cracked down on the anti-establishment Red Shirts, raising fears that the protesters would morph into an armed underground guerrilla group. Others worried that the government’s new draconian laws prohibiting public assembly would silence all opposition.

Out of this frightening moment came a group named Red Sunday. Led by Sombat Boongnamanong, a social activist, freedom fighter, and former theater performer, Red Sunday’s activities were intended to create a friendlier public face for opposition activities that wouldn’t run afoul of the government. They fused everyday activities (such as dining, donning certain outfits, shopping, and exercising) with political protest. In this way, Red Sunday’s demonstration did not look exactly like a conventional protest, except that they often used the color red.

An unidentified Belgrade boy holds a plastic toy gun mocking police officers in Belgrade, Serbia, May 2000. Members of the pro-opposition student group Otpor, or Resistance, gave out flowers to policemen and appealed for their restraint in the worsening government crackdown on political opponents. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

One of Red Sunday’s most memorable skits was an aerobic dance at the biggest public park in Bangkok in July 2010. Around 400 participants dressed in red sports outfits and ghost makeup intended to remind the public of the crackdown that had taken place few months ago. Like other park visitors, they gathered for a group aerobic dance routine popular among Thais. But theirs was unusual. The “instructor” led them in dancing to Red Shirt songs and in different silly steps that made the multigenerational crowd laugh and captured the attention of passersby. At other times, protesters would dress as ghosts, walk downtown, and hop on the monorail, reminding other passengers of the regime’s repressiveness. Protesters also would meet up for a picnic in a public park, go shopping at the mall en masse, or ride bicycles through Bangkok streets.

Red Sunday’s small acts of defiance carved out a space for political activism in a time of repression and despair, and normalized the act of resistance for Thailand’s middle class, which has traditionally supported the political establishment. The regime would have appeared ridiculous if it had cracked down on a bunch of aerobic dancers. This tactical advantage, called the “dilemma action” because of the bind it places the leadership in, is particularly useful for activists trapped under authoritarian—and unimaginative—rule. Red Sunday’s playful actions paved the way for the resurgence of the anti-establishment movement, which won an important electoral victory in 2011.

The experiences of Serbia and Thailand show how humor can be deployed differently, and toward different ends. In Serbia, Otpor used humorous protest actions in a systematic way, with a well-crafted strategy of nonviolent defiance, with hundreds of local chapters across the country attracting broad-based support. As a result, as the number of humorous events increased, their impact was multiplied. In contrast, Thailand’s Red Sunday was an ad hoc group working on a smaller scale.

Serbian children play with flour around an activist of the anti-government group Otpor, or Resistance, during a protest action entitled “Let’s spice up the food,” meant to bring awareness of the importance of Yugoslav national elections in September 2000 in Belgrade. Photo by Darko Vojinovic/Associated Press.

More importantly, while Otpor used humor offensively, Red Sunday used it defensively. Otpor wanted to step up the political momentum to topple Milošević and transform the Serbian political landscape. Red Sunday’s humor, on the other hand, sustained nonviolence as a movement when the Red Shirts were on the brink of becoming militarized, a transformation that could have undermined their long-term goals by provoking another government crackdown.

But the two campaigns also had a lot in common. Both helped reduce fear among the populace and induced participation in protest activities. They also drew media attention to protest movements, increasing publicity and political momentum. And they reversed the effects of repression by exposing the incongruity between a regime’s claims and the reality of its rule.

Finally, both demonstrate how humorous protest can offer a space for utopian enactment: encouraging people to imagine other political possibilities through parties, concerts, and festivals. This ability to imagine is extremely crucial for social change. People can be politically submissive if they think there is no alternative and change is not possible.

For activists, there are no limits to the supply of humor—after all, it comes from deep within our different cultures—but there are limits to how it can be used. Joking “with” others rather than “at” others is important, as is knowing what crosses the line and violates norms, and what does not. Jokes do not fly if they are out of context. Activists who know what, culturally, triggers laughter can use that knowledge to their advantage, even against the most seemingly omnipotent governments.

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