ALONIA, Greece — The feisty owner of a small family business that makes detergents has never had time for anticapitalist firebrands. So he was suspicious and skeptical when he was approached by left-leaning activists campaigning to purge “profiteers” from the market.

But, struggling to keep his business afloat under the weight of unpaid invoices and constant demands for bribes, the owner, Savvas Mavromatis, decided to give their proposal a shot. He started selling his products directly to consumers for cash at fixed prices through a nonprofit collective, instead of to shops and traders as he had always done.

Fourteen months later, he credits the group with saving his enterprise from a Greek economic meltdown that rivals the Great Depression.

“We are in the middle of a terrible crisis and are just looking for solutions,” said Elias Tsolakidis, the driving force behind the so-called no-middlemen movement here in northern Greece, a small, quixotic but surprisingly successful effort to redefine the terms of commerce. “We don’t have a magic wand. We are not communists and we are not capitalists, but we are trying to help people survive.”