On Wednesday, January 2, 1935, a twenty-five-year-old worker in a French factory lost control of her movements. Slight, underfed, and suffering from migraines and an ear infection, she wasn’t able to shut the flame damper of a furnace which, as she recounted, produced “intolerable heat,” and flames that would “come up to lick your hands and arms.” A fellow factory worker rushed over to shut it for her. After recovering, she got back to work, in pain and suffering an awful headache, exacerbated by the “terrible mallet blows a few meters away.”

Unlike the other piece workers, who were paid only for what they produced, Simone Weil did not need to be there. Her well-paid job as a university teacher meant that there was no financial need. Instead, she took the job in order to experience the reality of factory work.

Weil believed that most Marxist writing about the proletariat failed to grasp the experience of day-to-day life for those on the front lines of labor. “One can no more be a revolutionary by words alone than one can be a mason or a blacksmith,” she argued. If one wanted to lead the proletariat toward class consciousness — to become a revolutionary class “for-itself” — one had to experience what workers themselves felt and needed.