> Have you never heard of the labor movement? The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class?

The irony, of course, being that government bureaucracies are inherently an instrumentality of the managerial class. It's not as if the Secretary of Labor is a line worker with no college degree.

So the agency becomes subject to regulatory capture the same as any other and private sector unions declined. Meanwhile the public sector unions remained because most government workers are themselves members of the managerial class, so the public sector unions, rather than representing line workers against a corporate bureaucracy that employs them, came to represent the bureaucracy itself against the elected representatives of the people.

Is it so surprising that it doesn't come first to mind as an instance of successful activism?