risking their lives for more radical changes.
I wasn't talking about protracted peoples' war or something; programmers aren't a revolutionary class. What I meant was organizing, that is to say building organizations, potentially with a broad material justification. For example in addition to free software you focus on the deprofessionalization of the industry, the formation of the precariat, and housing cost. There are many types of software development where unions are feasible, although they've been crushed in the past. Further a wise organization only strikes when it is certain it can win, although often this is very difficult to judge.
I genuinely think the bias for technical solutions is a bias, if something always seems to work you are more likely to look for that type of solution in the future, and in many domains, especially for someone with good technical skills, technical solutions help.