On January 27, 2026, at the height of Operation Metro Surge and in the immediate aftermath of the
murder
of Alex Pretti, Dylan Alverson, the owner of a south Minneapolis café known as Modern Times, took to Instagram to make
an announcement
. He explained that Modern Times was changing their name and their business model. From that day forward, “until this occupation is over,” the newly named Post Modern Times would be “free to all.” The purpose of this change was to enable the café to refuse “to generate taxes under the guise of a functioning for-profit capitalist business aligned with government strategy.” Not long after, “border czar” Tom Homan announced the drawdown that came to pass in February, precipitating a decline in both ICE and partisan activity; yet the Post Modern Times continued in this capacity for a further six months.
This retrospective is aimed at elaborating the lessons the Post Modern Times experiment has to offer aspiring revolutionaries. We examine the experiment’s successes and limits in building dual power economically and counteracting what we will call
the viscosity of race,
in order to explore what it shows us about the meaning of partisanship.
An Experiment
In the winter of 2026, the federal ICE occupation known as Operation Metro Surge met immense and widespread resistance. This
insurgency
is described in detail
elsewhere
; here, it suffices to say that one element contributing to its apparent strength—as well as its limits—was the emergence of a cross-class alliance. This tenuous coalition saw many business owners make crucial contributions, from the simple act of posting signs barring entry to federal agents to donating to “mutual aid” organizing and
supporting their employees when they clashed with ICE directly
. While revolutionaries should examine the limits that this alliance introduced into the movement, that is not the purpose of this text. Here, we aim to examine the successes and limits of a much-lauded yet under-analyzed situation that emerged as a consequence of this cross-class alliance, a singular action taken by one small business during Operation Metro Surge: (Post) Modern Times café
changing their business model
from regular pricing to functioning entirely on donations in order to stop paying taxes to the government oppressing their community.
The decision to shift business models represented a significant experiment in economic resistance to state power. It offered us a glimpse of what it could look like to engage seriously in “re-organizing economic [life],” albeit one clouded by the experiment’s failure to spread.
1
In a moment of significant upheaval in which private property went largely unquestioned and unchallenged, the refusal of a business to charge for meals in order to cease to pay sales tax could be understood as a kind of proto-communist measure. While obviously not without its limits, it anticipates communist social relations by setting the price of commodities at zero, at which point they cease to be commodities at all.
2
On July 24, Alverson announced the temporary closure of the café and the end of the business model he had introduced in January. While the difficulty of relying on donations from the public alone to fund the longstanding operation may have played no small role in this decision, it is far from the only factor. In fact, hardly a month prior to the announcement, the
New York Times
ran
an article on the café
, reporting that surprisingly, the model had provided a certain amount of financial stability. A
subsequent report
from the
Star Tribune
advanced a different narrative: despite the supposed altruism of the café’s usual customer base and surrounding homeowners, the influx of poor, racialized, and in many cases homeless people proved to be too much for their delicate sensibilities. In the
Star Tribune
article, one neighbor said that this experiment had created the “first time I don’t feel safe” in the same neighborhood where the state murdered George Floyd and Renee Good.
The Viscosity of Race
Opened in 2011, Modern Times has long been humorously referred to as the place “punks bring their parents.” The fusion of hippie and punk aesthetics that define the café has cemented its place in the southside Minneapolis subcultural scene. In view of this, it should be no surprise that the customer base has been predominantly white. That makes it all the more noteworthy that the experiment succeeded …