With right-wing media in the US now targeting @HarshaWalia and deliberately twisting the "burn it all down" phrase to generate disgust and discredit struggles for systemic change, here is a thread on the long history of that 🔥 phraseology in struggles for social justice.
Historian Mark Leier's biography of Mikhail Bakunin, The Creative Passion, is so titled because Bakunin believed that "the passion for destruction is a creative passion." sfu.ca/history/public…
Bakunin did not *literally* mean the destruction of things per se; he was referring to the organized dismantling of social structures that protect injustice and oppression to radically transform society and creatively reorder it around truth, justice, and freedom.
In 1905, a new union was formed in Chicago - the Industrial Workers of the World - that similarly advocated for radical change and the abolition of the wasteful, exploitative capitalist system. The Wobblies, as they were known, were good with words, with many pamphlets and songs.
The preamble to the IWW constitution, which is as relevant today as ever, declares that the goal of all industrial workers should be building "the new society within the shell of the old." archive.iww.org/culture/offici…
The IWW was also a singing organization and its most famous song, a standard in the labour movement even today, is "Solidarity Forever," which concludes: "We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old/ For the union makes us strong."
The IWW was not advocating *literally* for arson, but using the phrase metaphorically. Arson, instead, was how bosses and hired thugs tried to destroy the Wobblies (e.g. by actually fire bombing their offices) to stamp out the union which sought to "fan the flames of discontent." 
More recently, this 🔥 phraseology has been used by movements for justice, including Black Lives Matter. Re: BLM, calls to "burn it down" were, again, metaphorical in response to systemic anti-Black racism and police repression in America.
Right-wing media loves to twist this phraseology for their own purposes. Here's how Fox covers calls to "burn down the system" if that system fails to take Black lives seriously: foxnews.com/media/black-li…
"Analysts" here try to take these "burn it all down" calls literally and then pin them to acts of property damage that often erupt in moments of indifference to human suffering and the state's use of force to protect the status quo. The goal is to discredit movements for change.
Of course right-wing media had little to say when Proud Boys burned and destroyed Black Lives Matter signs, because of course: teenvogue.com/story/proud-bo…
The phase "burn it all down" is also used in movement writing, again metaphorically. AK Press, which published @HarshaWalia's first book, even has a book called, "Burn it Down" featuring the likes of Sojourner Truth and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: akpress.org/burnitdown.html
The editor, Breanne Fahs, argues that "we need manifestos in all their urgent rawness—their insistence that we have to act now, that we must face this, that the bleeding edge of rage and defiance ignites new and revolutionary possibilities is where new ideas are born."
Again, this is not the "ignition" of actual, literal fires - but drawing on the long tradition of that phraseology - burning down the structures of injustice to create better futures.
In short, @HarshaWalia's call to "burn it all down" needs to be understood in the long history of that 🔥 phraseology on the left - from Bakunin, to the Wobblies and BLM, to recent radical writings.
You may disagree with this political perspective, and Harsha has acknowledged the compounding issue of her tweet's timing with wild fires in the west etc., but understanding the history of that phraseology is key. We mean burn it all down, but not literally.
We want to build a new world from the metaphorical ashes of the old. That remains the goal - that's why the odious defenders of exploitative status quo seek to discredit those movements.
Still, if conservatives are going to take calls to metaphorically "burn it to the ground" *literally*, then I look forward to their attempts to cancel Nickelback:
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