Kaliflower Commune

The Friends of Perfection Commune is an American Utopian community in San Francisco, CA. The San-Francisco-based commune was founded in 1967 on principles of a common treasury, group marriage, free art, & selfless service. They were originally called the Sutter/Scott Street commune, & commonly referred to by non-members as the Kaliflower commune after their newsletter of the same name. Because of their publishing activities, which allowed them to spread their philosophy, they became a significant influence on Bay Area culture. Many members of The Angels of Light, a free psychedelic drag theater group, originally lived in the Kaliflower commune. The name Kaliflower came from their publication of the same name, titled after the Hindu name for the last and most violent age of humankind, Kali Yuga.

Communes played an integral part of the 1960s American hippie movement. Members of the 1960s counterculture movement created new social institutions in the form of Utopian communes like Kaliflower as a way to exist outside of the hegemonic system and to resist enforced heterosexuality, the Vietnam War, capitalism, racism, mass media, and the government.

The Kaliflower community was founded on the same spiritual and economic principles as the Diggers: shared property and labor and the liberation of culture from commercialism. The commune's members were inspired by John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community, a socialist commune that existed in New York in the 1840s, and his book, The History of American Socialisms.

Cofounder Irving Rosenthal created the Free Print Shop, a print shop in the basement of Kaliflower, as a platform for uncensored, radical, free publishing in the Bay Area.

Irving Rosenthal was a writer and editor from San Francisco. He studied at the University of Chicago in the late 1950s where he was an editor of the Chicago Review. There he published many Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, Edward Dahlberg, and William Burroughs but he left the Chicago Review in 1959 after the University attempted to censor an issue of the Review. With the disputed material he cofounded a literary review called Big Table, which was charged with obscenity (and eventually won the case, adjudicated by Judge Julius Hoffman). Irving Rosenthal moved to New York City where he continued to edit and publish beat writers before returning to San Francisco in 1967 with the intention of setting up his own publishing commune free of censorship. He moved with Hibiscus, founder of the Cockettes, an avant garde psychedelic hippie theater group, and started the Kaliflower commune and the Free Print Shop.

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