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The protest movements didn't create the good policy. Individuals did, usually in-power types. The sequence seems to be: protests or other WotW create pressure on the bad policies by spotlighting them, then some adjacent party uses more powerful means to actually drive change
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While someone has to actually write the policy, sometimes that's just the falling action in causality after a mass movement made it possible. Marx wrote a theory that led to mass movements that led to Lenin dictating exact policy. Are you talking causality or something else?
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I think this theory is basically wrong. The actual causal path peaks with the creative insight, which has no real correlation. It can happen long before or long after. The movement just creates a window of opportunity for the option to be exercised if it exists or is created.
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Like doing a protest demanding anti-gravity doesn’t automatically create anti-gravity tech. It’s a mistake to think policy formulation is any less of an act of inspired invention. That’s how you get bad non-policy proposals like GND or UBI. They’re stubs pretending to be code.
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No. It required technologies that didn’t rely on muscle power that gave women economic agency first. Lowell textile mills, work in urban retail, typing etc. The policy ride the altered societal structures induced by thise developments.
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Tech-determinist yes. Social determinists vastly overstate the importance of collective action. Those are important but downstream of optionality created by expanding new tech options... driven largely by individuals initially, before collective creativity joins the party..
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You can keep going back link by link in this chain, though, a technology influences a movement which influences a technology on and on, which perhaps means that it’s more useful to posit a kind of loop, a dialectical process, because finding the start isn’t particularly useful.
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I used to buy the loop model, and even wrote up a version. Now I’m increasingly skeptical. Just because there’s a loop doesn’t mean forward and backward pathways are ontologically the same. It’s the systems nerd version of bothsidesing.