The Fabric of Power: Repatterning Coordination to Weave the World We Deserve

A colorful textile made of woven pieces threaded through each other. — Credit: Alecsander Alves on Unsplash

For those of us committed to social justice, the present struggle is not simply about removing fascists from office and restoring the old order. Liberatory change requires that we imagine radically new futures and develop the necessary power to build the world we deserve.

But in this struggle, we must ask: What kind of power will we need to build such a world, and how should power work differently within it? If our goal is not restoration but reconstruction of our society, then the theories of power that got us here won’t be enough to get us there.

Consider Saul Alinsky’s influential thinking from the 1960s and 70s, which treats power much like a resource: finite and scarce, won or lost through an endless contest between the “haves” and “have-nots.” Many contemporary organizers and strategists still operate as if power belongs only to those who control government institutions. Similarly, respected organizer Marshall Ganz mainly sees power as leverage: If you need my resources more than I need yours, I have power over you.

These theories remain relevant and useful in appropriate contexts. Yet a liberated future cannot be built on power that is binary (we are either “in power” or “out of power”), zero-sum (for me to have more power, you must have less), and based on maintaining leverage over others.

If our goal is not restoration but reconstruction of our society, then the theories of power that got us here won’t be enough to get us there.

Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins reminds us that our framing of power represents a fundamental philosophical and political choice. “Black women have not conceptualized our quest for empowerment as one of replacing elite white male authorities with ourselves as benevolent Black female ones,” she wrote in her book Black Feminist Thought. “Instead, African American women have overtly rejected theories of power based on domination…to embrace an alternative vision of power…a humanist vision of self-actualization, self-definition, and self-determination.”

Collins shows us where liberation begins: not where power is absent, not where the “right” people are in control, but in a society built on fundamentally different patterns of power.

As adrienne maree brown, Andrea Ritchie, and Ruha Benjamin teach, we are building the future even now, through the patterns we reinforce in our everyday practice. We determine the power of tomorrow through the theories we choose to center today.

Coordination as Power

When we speak and act as if power is a possession, a station, or a chain of command, we reinforce just one of its many facets: the ability to compel others to do what we want. But power is more nuanced than that. An alternative image helps us appreciate its full nature.

Power is more like a fabric. It is produced by threads of coordination among people, institutions, ideas, and ecosystems. For example, narrative carries power when it generates shared meaning that coordinates our perception, identity, and willingness to act. Organizational design carries power when it coordinates how we frame problems and who can be involved in solving them. Fear carries power when it coordinates internal compliance without the need for overt coercion. Solidarity carries power when it coordinates a mutual response to an otherwise localized threat.

Coordination, then, is the fabric of power.

How its threads are patterned—who can initiate them, how they flow, how they adapt to feedback—determines the kind of power that emerges.

Some fabrics are woven to restrain. They are tight and rigid, reinforced by fear and scarcity, designed to bind bodies and possibilities. Their patterns propagate power for only a privileged few. Other fabrics are woven to hold, enable, and heal. They connect, they distribute weight, and they breathe. Their patterns conduct the flow of collective power.

When we view power this way, our challenge becomes both sobering and alive. Sobering because we realize how power structures persist not only in institutions, but through relational patterns that reproduce themselves automatically. This same challenge becomes alive because we realize power is not only “out there” in structures we don’t control, but also here, moving through every thread we choose to hold, strengthen, loosen, or refuse.

A coordination lens helps us see that power can take many forms: not only Power Over, but also Power Within, Power To, Power With, and Power Through.

Our success in eliminating fascism and building the world we deserve depends on our ability to reject Power Over and allow the rest to flow freely.

Rejecting Power Over

Power Over is perhaps the most immediately recognizable form of power. It evokes images of domination, coercion, and hierarchy: the boss barking orders, police in riot gear, aircraft carriers. To have “power over” someone is to control them, to bend their will to serve your ends, to subordinate their agency to your own. It is inherently extractive, inherently oppressive. And it is a pillar in the foundation of fascism.

Power Over was at work in Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s politically motivated, violent occupation and disappearance campaign by ICE from December 2025 through February 2026 in Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN. During that time, more than 3,000 immigration enforcement agents were deployed to the area, performing warrantless entries to separate parents from children in their homes, racially profiling and brutalizing people of color, and forcing observers to exit vehicles at gunpoint to arrest them. The strategy was violence and fear; the goal was to forcibly suppress political opposition.

Coordination, then, is the fabric of power.

But Power Over is not only produced in overt acts of violence and force. It is also a structural dynamic, an enclosure by an entitled minority of the capacity to coordinate: the freedom to initiate and connect a thread, and to influence the pattern of the weave.

For example, Power Over is behind structural changes, including cuts to Medicaid and federal child care support, that are increasingly limiting women’s material options and pressuring them to play traditional caregiving roles in the home. It also shows up in our organizing and organizations—for instance when philanthropy is elite-driven rather than participatory, when leadership is controlling rather than life-giving, and when accountability is punitive rather than loving.

Today, we seem to tolerate the patterns of Power Over as unfortunate but practical necessities of coordination in human systems.

But we don’t need Power Over to get things done. We can choose to coordinate through different patterns.

Cultivating Power Within

Power Within is the internal coherence—among body, history, feeling, mind—that gives a person self-determined clarity of volition. It is the ability to pattern oneself with integrity and produce intent without inner war. It is the power that allows a person, even amid fear, pain, and uncertainty, to act from a place of clarity and courage.

When ICE descended on Minnesota’s communities, tens of thousands of residents drew on their Power Within, coordinating the will to put their own comfort, stability, and physical safety on the line to defend and care for their neighbors. Even as ICE was known to use retaliatory force, Minnesotans swarmed to record ICE encounters, arranged healthcare home visits, and delivered food and other essentials to those who could not leave their homes safely. Many immigrants and people of color were themselves active responders and mutual aid operatives, despite being especially at risk amid rampant racial profiling by ICE.

Power Within is not about suppressing our fears or sacrificing ourselves for the cause. It’s not about domination of the mind over emotion. Rather, it’s about finding harmony among our emotional, cognitive, somatic, and other internal systems. It is about defining for ourselves the worldview and narratives through which we make meaning of our experience.

Power Within is not only an internal dynamic but is also shaped by our context. That context might reflect what bell hooks described as an ethic of love, in which one nurtures one’s own—or another’s—spiritual growth through care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.

Minnesotans have been so powerful in their resistance to ICE occupation because they are embracing a love ethic. They are giving us a glimpse of the kind of “humanity-stretching” society that Grace Lee Boggs called us into. In their resistance, Minnesotans are rejecting the dominant narratives of othering and separateness, embracing the narratives of belonging and solidarity instead. They are supporting one another to transmute trauma and heartbreak into courage. Every person who lets their Power Within shine is making it easier, safer, more compelling for others to find their power as well.

When the self is allowed to reclaim its full interior space, it becomes a node of coherence in systems dominated by Power Over. Power Within changes not only how we act but what kinds of coordination we can imagine, trust, and sustain. As Audre Lorde insisted, our self-knowledge and internal coherence is not a luxury. It is the soil of liberatory futures that makes every other form of power possible.

Unlocking Power To

Power To is material coordinative capacity: the ability to initiate, connect, and activate threads in the collective fabric. It involves internal coordination among cognitive, emotional, and biophysical resources, as well as coordination between the self and the system. It arises when internal will aligns with what the system allows, and it operates at multiple scales, from the individual to the collective.

On January 23, 2026, Minnesotans staged a massive economic and disruptive pressure campaign against ICE activity in their communities, promising “No Work, No School, No Shopping” during a day of collective action. Workplaces and schools shut down, nearly 100 clergy members were arrested for disrupting airport operations, and more than 50,000 people marched through downtown Minneapolis in sub-zero temperatures.

Minnesota’s resistance embodies a profound truth: Fighting fascism and building the world that comes next are not separate efforts; they are the same task.

The success of this mass mobilization was possible not only because of the vision and planning of the labor, faith, and immigrant rights organizations that hosted it. It was possible also because the fabric of coordination, which enabled people to move together, was already strong when the call to action came. Robust threads of coordination throughout the community had been woven through decades of base building and organizing, patterned by a deep lineage of radical organizing, and reinforced in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Minnesota’s day of action reveals what it means to build the kind of Power To that can successfully resist fascist control: namely, power that flows up from the will of individuals and through collective action—not the other way around, where power flows outward from a centralized will, enacting coordination through directives to masses of protesters, donors, or voters. Minnesota shows us that effectively countering fascism will require not broadcast and command, but invitation and inclusion; not only intent, but also the ability to act.

That’s why it matters how we coordinate action. And that comes down to Power With.

Amplifying via Power With

Power With is what allows individual power to flow into collective action at scale.

From a coordination perspective, Power With is not simply a matter of having large numbers or even acting together. It refers instead to a quality of relationship: one that allows people to move together even in difference and stay together even through tension. It exists when people with divergent perspectives, needs, and identities find belonging that doesn’t require the erasure or assimilation of others. It grows when groups are able to metabolize dissent, friction, and contradiction without collapsing into dominance.

We wield our full collective power when these patterns are present. When they are absent, the will of a subset of people dominates that of the rest.

Power With is not an automatic consequence of shared background, mutual interest, or proximity. Instead, it must be cultivated through practices of care, repair, and reorientation.

Minnesota’s practice of collective care and mutual aid during and after Operation Metro Surge is a powerful example. Neighbors are distributing food, water, hand warmers, and even love notes to rapid responders, protesters, and those holding vigil, giving them the material and emotional sustenance to continue their work. Massive food assistance operations increase community self-sufficiency to sustain resistance. Importantly, these relationships and networks bridge many lines of difference, allowing everyone’s power to flow.

Especially in this struggle against fascism, Power With as a relational quality is not optional. When viewed through the lens of coordination, it’s clear that this kind of relationality is the precondition for any alternative to domination. As an amplifier of individual and collective power, it is also a prerequisite to systems change.

Conducting Power Through

Power Through is the momentum that flows within systems, coordinating behavior through self-replicating patterns rather than centralized commands. It is constructed in the sedimented layers of habit, neural pathways, cultural myth, institutional protocols, and interlocking systems of oppression. The patterns operate as if on their own. Once set into motion, they shape behavior in the system, often without explicit consent.

Power Through is why systems change is so hard. You can’t engineer change when every problem is a symptom of yet another problem, and no one is really in control. It’s also why conventional strategies—based on methodologies and tools that assume linear causality and mechanical dynamics—are mismatched to the task of displacing fascism.

We can’t plan and execute our way to systems change. But we can strategically cultivate the conditions within which it can arise.

A system’s inertia can be changed slowly, through the cumulative influence of small, repeated actions—the emergence that adrienne maree brown describes. It can also change suddenly and dramatically, when mature relational infrastructure exists and latent tension builds to a threshold, eventually releasing in an emergent cascade of new coordination patterns. These new patterns can enable novel capabilities in a system, as Minnesotans have demonstrated.

The fabric of power is never finished. It is rewoven every day, through small choices that look insignificant until they repeat, through who gets heard, through whose experience is made default, through whom we saddle with unspoken risk, through what we treat as sacred and what we treat as disposable.

Operation Metro Surge was intended to overwhelm through sheer scale and force. But communities in the Twin Cities met that surge with an equally widespread and vigorous response. In some communities, rapid response Signal chats maxed out at 1,000 responders every day before noon. Organizers estimate that more than one in every 25 residents in every neighborhood was participating in such chats.

Critically, successful resistance wasn’t about engineering and controlling the response; it was about participating in it and letting it bloom.

Greg Nammacher, president of SEIU Local 26, explained to Jacobin that the scale and resilience of Minnesota’s resistance was not due to central coordination, but decentralized emergence: “[T]here are so many centers of gravity. There are so many players in motion right now, organized on their blocks, organized through Signal groups, structures that didn’t exist…just literally weeks ago, that are now playing key roles.”

Minnesota’s emergent resistance shows us the promise of Power Through: It repatterned coordination at scale in a material, lasting way.

As writer and social worker Cecelia Caspram described, Minnesota has been “making a whole new world,” and “an individualistic, hateful, fearful reality is falling away.” “Capitalism dissolved for a period of time,” according to one Minneapolis resident speaking on an NPQ webinar.

Now, Minnesotans don’t want to return to the way things were. As one resident told NBC News, “Trying to go back to a phony-baloney corporate job of filing trademarks and talking about profit shares versus incentives…is just so ultimately meaningless.”

The gravity of the system has shifted.

Minnesotans have shown us the truth of our present struggle: When systems change is the goal, repatterning power is the strategy.

The power to do so resides within and among us. The question is, will we have the courage to follow Minnesota’s lead and let the patterns of domination fall away?

Are We Ready to Do What It Takes to Dismantle Fascism?

Minnesota’s resistance embodies a profound truth: Fighting fascism and building the world that comes next are not separate efforts; they are the same task.

Angela Y. Davis, Langston Hughes, and others made the crucial diagnosis decades ago: Fascism has been living with us in the white supremacy and racial capitalism that have patterned our society since before the country’s founding. Today’s rapidly spreading regime represents metastasis, a more enveloping and gruesome manifestation of our late-stage disease.

We can remove autocratic leaders from positions of institutional authority—and indeed we must—but that alone will not cure the ailment. Eliminating fascism requires a repatterning in the very fabric of society.

How much domination and extraction will we tolerate to get this job done? Whatever it takes? Just a little?

If we are serious about dismantling fascism—not just voting out its figureheads or removing its effects only for the most privileged among us—then we must strive for the answer to be “none at all.”

But the times are urgent and the stakes are high. Will we manage to choose the patterns of coordination this would require?

Will we continue to treat people as statistics in voter propensity models, their value defined by their relevance to electoral outcomes? Or will we treat them—all of them—as whole beings, whose internal coherence is the true source of our power?

Will we continue to coordinate via top-down control? Or will we build our movements and organizations to enable the flow of power from distributed individual will through collective action?

Will we continue to prioritize speed and efficiency over inclusion and relational health? Or will we invest in the quality of relationship needed to move together and stay together, despite our differences?

Will we continue to strategize as if we can engineer and plan our way to justice? Or will we build the muscle and the courage to carry our threads with intention, tend the weave, and trust in emergence?

The Fabric We Are Always Weaving

The question is not whether we will participate in power. We always will. The question is what decisions we will make when the pressure is on. What kind of coordination we will normalize, what capacities we will cultivate, and what fabric we will keep weaving together until it becomes strong enough to hold what we say we want.

One day, we will find ourselves having regained control of democratic institutions and facing the task of reconstructing our country. When that time comes, will we rebuild via well-worn coordination pathways—the ones through which the power of wealthy, white men flows so smoothly? Or will we have patterned new pathways that allow us all to shape what comes next?

If we want any hope of the latter, our order of operations cannot be to first defeat fascists at the polls, then change how power works. Transforming power must become how we defeat fascism. And that work must start now.