The "emphasis" that is put on breaking shit is largely a way of taking a non-legalized or illegal forms of action. Because legal avenues do not “work”. The state is not going to listen to a bunch of people sitting in the street to block some movement, just as much as the state is not going to a listen to a petition, nor a member of the green party that gets elected to a seat in office, which has been seen time and again by the different factions of the Left. To engage in property destruction or more so a strategic attack against institutions, is an active refusal of engaging in speaking truth to power. The very idea that those whole hold positions of power actual have an interest in listening.
The basis of these acts, is by and part in trying to destroy the present order, whether they are banks, police stations, currently exist within capital, state and if one goes further civilization. It is also the active negation of some present utopia that can be created here and now. Again another one of the failure of the hippie movement in the sixties and seventies, by setting up alternative life styles and communes outside of the city limits. These acts are more immediate rather than again wait for the right moment of “revolution”.
I do not necessarily want to take a stance of "social change" with the fact that power is the "real" creator of violence. Violence is not an ethical debate. All forms of domination and exploitation are obviously violent, there is no need to come to some non-violence vs violence talk. There are some anarchist who seem themselves at war with the current order. Engaging in a war that is social and not-militaristic in the sense that they use a non-hierarchical set of relations to act together as a group, crew, autonomous base or affinity group against power.