[1] The commune was founded in 1967 on principles of a common treasury, group marriage, free anonymous art, gay liberation, and selfless service.

Because the commune's publishing activities helped spread their philosophy, they became a significant influence on Bay Area culture.

[1] Many members of The Angels of Light, a free psychedelic drag theater group, originally lived in the Kaliflower commune.

[3] Members of the 1960s counterculture movement created communes as a way to survive outside the hegemonic system and to resist the boredom of enforced heterosexuality, the Vietnam War, capitalism, racism, mass media, and the government.

[7] The Kaliflower commune was founded on the spiritual and economic principles of the Diggers: shared resources, free labor, fun, and the liberation of culture from commercialism.

[3] The commune's members were also inspired by John Humphrey Noyes, founder of the Oneida Community (a perfectionist religious communal society that existed in New York in the 1840s) and his book, History of American Socialisms,[3] to embrace practices of group marriage, mutual criticism, and selfless service.

[9][10] There he edited and published many Beat writers including Jack Kerouac, Edward Dahlberg, and William Burroughs; but Rosenthal and most of the staff quit the Chicago Review in 1959 after the University attempted to censor an issue of the Review because it included material from William Burroughs then-unpublished novel Naked Lunch .

[9][10] To publish the disputed material they cofounded a literary review called Big Table, which was immediately charged with obscenity by the U.S.

[1] He was joined by Hibiscus (a founder of psychedelic free theater groups The Cockettes and the Angels of Light),[14] starting the commune.

[6][8] Starting in April 1969, members of the group worked in the print shop to create Kaliflower, the free, inter-communal newsletter.

Each issue of Kaliflower was printed in-house and bound by hand using the Japanese method of overstitching yarn on either the top or side.

[1][18] It inspired the Food Not Bombs program, an all-volunteer-run global movement that shares free vegan meals as a protest to war and poverty.

[19] The Free Food Conspiracy also gave rise to the Really Really Free Market, a movement of temporary markets based on the gift economy where participants bring unneeded items, food, and skills like haircuts to a community space to share with other participants with the principle of countering capitalism.

[21] Its existence continues to inspire the creation of other utopian, anti-capitalist communes and resource-sharing groups with similar values.