Being underground is not a condition Enric Duran always takes literally, but one night in late January he went from basement to basement. At a hackerspace under a tiny library just south of Paris, he met a group of activists from across France and then traveled with them by bus and Métro to another meeting place, in an old palace on the north end of the city. On the ground floor it felt like an art gallery, with white walls and sensitive acoustics, but the basement below was like a cave, full of costumes and scientific instruments and exposed masonry. There, Duran arranged chairs in a circle for the dozen or so people who'd made the journey. As they were settling in and discussing which language they'd speak, a woman from upstairs, attending an event about open licenses, peeked in through the doorway. She pointed Duran out to her friend, trying, barely, to contain herself. After the meeting was over, she came right up to him. "You're the bank robber!" she said.

The French activists indulged him with questions based on whatever hazy grasp of it they could manage—some political, some technical. How does FairCoin relate to FairCredit? What can you buy in the FairMarket? How many FairCoins go into each fund, and what are they for? Most of these came from the men, all more or less young, who stroked their chins as they listened. Most of the women left before it was over. Duran's voice was never other than monotone, but his responses nonetheless sang a kind of rhapsody. The answers to a lot of the various what-if questions were some variation of "We can decide."

He had gathered the group to describe his latest undertaking, FairCoop, which gradually revealed itself to be no less than a whole new kind of global financial system. With it, he said, communities around the world would be able to trade, fund one another's growth, redistribute wealth, and make collective decisions. They would hack currency markets to fund themselves while replacing competitive capitalism with cooperation. He proceeded to reel off the names of its sprawling component parts: FairMarket, FairCredits, Fairtoearth, the Global South Fund, and so on. "We will be able to make exchanges with no government controls," he promised in broken English. To get the project going, he had hijacked a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency called FairCoin.

In that basement Duran held court. Slouching, the 38-year-old anticapitalist activist had a space between his two front teeth, grizzly hair, and a matching beard—black except for stray grays mixed in throughout. He wore a white sweatshirt. His presence was discreet and stilted, yet it carried authority in the room. While others made small talk he looked off elsewhere, but his attention became total as soon as the conversation turned to the matter on his mind and the opportunity to collaborate.

Before robbing banks, Enric Duran networked. As a teenager he was a professional table-tennis player and helped restructure the Catalan competition circuit to be more equitable. He turned his attention toward larger injustices in his early 20s, when he read Erich Fromm's diagnosis of materialist society and Henry David Thoreau's call to disobedience. This was the late 1990s, high times for what is alternately called the global-justice or anti-globalization movement. The Zapatistas had risen up in southern Mexico in recent years, and just weeks before Y2K, activists with limbs locked together and faces in masks shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. According to Northeastern University anthropologist Jeffrey Juris, in Barcelona "Enric was at the center of organizing everything"—so much so that he became one of the main sources for Juris's book about network culture. People called him el hombre conectado.

The only reason that the group was willing to even consider this bewildering set of possibilities was that Duran was, in fact, a well-known bank robber—the man who expropriated several hundred thousand euros from Spanish banks during the lead-up to the 2008 financial crisis, for which he was still in hiding from the law. He had used the momentum from his heist to organize the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of cooperatives functioning throughout the region of Catalonia, in northeast Spain, which the activists in Paris were attempting to replicate throughout France. His undertakings tended to work. Perhaps even this.

An entrepreneur friend of Duran's first suggested the idea of borrowing money from banks and not giving it back. At first they talked about organizing a mass action, involving many borrowers, or else just making a fictional film about it. After the friend died in a car accident, Duran decided to act by himself. In the fall of 2005 he began setting up companies on paper and applying for loans. Soon, he had a mortgage from Caixa Terrassa worth €201,000 (then nearly $310,000). It was the first of 68 acts of borrowing, from car loans to credit cards, involving 39 banks. The loans, he said, totaled around €492,000—€360,000 not including interest and fees along the way. That was more than $500,000 at the time.

Duran had been studying the nature of money, which he came to see as an instrument of global debt servitude on behalf of financial elites, carrying the stain of their usurious dealings wherever it went. He became convinced that big banks were the chief causes of injustice in the world. But, he thought, maybe they could be a solution too.

Robbing he banks was a spectacle, but one that created networks and built momentum for other projects. 'This is not the story of one action,' Duran said. 'It is a process of building an alternative economic system.'

Duran helped organize the Catalan contingent for protests at the 2000 World Bank and IMF meetings in Prague; a cop there whacked him on the head in the streets. He called for ending reliance on oil and for canceling the debts of poor countries. He was then living on a small allowance from his father, a pharmacist, until using the remainder of it to help set up a cooperative infoshop in Barcelona called Infospai in 2003. He'd hoped to support himself with Infospai, but it was soon plagued with money problems, like the projects of so many activist groups around him. They needed new streams of revenue that capitalism was unlikely to provide.

The beginning of the end came in the summer of 2007. Duran noticed signs of the mortgage crisis forming in the United States and decided that it was time to prepare to go public. During the next year, he assembled a collective to produce a newspaper detailing the evils of banks and what he had done to trick them. The people who helped organize the Degrowth March could become a ready-made distribution network throughout Catalonia. He selected a date: September 17, 2008.

For almost three years, Duran worked steadily and methodically. "My strategy was completely systematic," he wrote in his testimony, Abolish the Banks, "as if my actions were part of an assembly line in a Fordist production system." He'd carry a briefcase to meetings with bankers, though he couldn't bring himself to wear a tie. For a single item—say, a video camera—he'd get the same loan from multiple banks. As he acquired more cash, he funded groups around him that he knew and trusted. He backed the Degrowth March, a bicycle ride around Catalonia organized in opposition to the logic of economic growth, and equipped Infospai with a TV studio.

He now refers to this as his "public action." All along he'd planned it that way—a spectacle, but one that would create networks and build momentum for other projects. "This is not the story of one action," he said. "It is a process of building an alternative economic system."

The timing was pretty amazing. On September 15, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, marking beyond doubt the arrival of a global financial crisis. That morning Duran flew from Barcelona to Lisbon, Portugal, and then the next day from Lisbon to São Paulo, Brazil, where his friend Lirca was living. On the 17th—three years to the day before Occupy Wall Street protesters took over Zuccotti Park in New York—volunteers across Catalonia handed out 200,000 copies of his newspaper, Crisis. Until the day before, most of them had no idea what news they'd be spreading. The international media picked up the story, and Duran became known as the Robin Hood of the banks.

Like the bank action, the idea was both political and practical. Duran had financial difficulties with Infospai, but it also taught him that there were certain benefits to organizing as a cooperative. The Spanish government normally exacts a hefty self-employment tax for independent workers—on the order of about $315 per month, plus a percentage of income—but if one can claim one's work as taking place within a cooperative, the tax doesn't apply. Amid the cascading crisis, people were losing their jobs, and the tax made it hard for them to pick up gigs on the side to get by—unless they were willing to join together as a cooperative. Duran wasn't planning a traditional cooperative business, owned and operated by its workers or by those who use its services. Instead he wanted to create an umbrella under which people could live and work on their own terms, in all sorts of ways. The idea was to help people out and radicalize them at the same time. The rich use tax loopholes to secure their dominance; now anticapitalists could do the same.

In Brazil, Duran set up a website for supporters to discuss the next move. At first, the plan was to mount a mass debt strike. People around the world started organizing to renege on their loans, but the scale of participation necessary to hurt the banks seemed overwhelming, and the plan was scuttled. In the last months of 2008, Duran, Lirca, and their friends pivoted toward another proposal—the Integral Cooperative and, eventually, the Integral Revolution.

Duran was thrown into jail, but he went free two months later, after an anonymous donor posted his bail. Thus began almost four years of freedom and organizing with his friends. They made sure to set up the cooperative legal structure at the outset, so that the tax benefits could draw people into the system. Then the priority was to arrange for necessities: food from farmers, housing in squats and communes, health care by natural and affordable means. By early 2010 the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) was real, with commissions and monthly assemblies. The following year, when the 15M movement, a precursor to Occupy Wall Street, installed itself in city squares across Spain to rail against austerity and corruption, protesters swelled the CIC's ranks. Replica cooperatives began to emerge in other regions of Spain and in France. None of the money from Duran's loans actually went to forming it, but it grew with his notoriety, his networks, and his fervid activity.

The group chose the word integral, which means "whole wheat" in Spanish and Catalan, to connote the totality, synthesis, and variety of the project. It emboldened Duran, and he began making promises of his return to Catalonia. He devoted much of the remaining money from his loans to a second newspaper, We Can! While Crisis had focused on the problems of the banking system, We Can! would be about solutions. The cover declared, "We can live without capitalism. We can be the change that we want!" It outlined the vision Duran and his friends had been developing for an Integral Cooperative. On March 17, 2009, exactly six months after Crisis, 350,000 copies of We Can! appeared throughout Spain. The same day, Duran surfaced on the campus of the University of Barcelona, and he was promptly arrested. Several banks had filed complaints against him. The Spanish prosecutor called for an eight-year prison sentence.

Each of the enterprises advertised at Aurea Social operate more or less independently while being, to varying degrees, linked to the CIC. At last count, the CIC consisted of 674 different projects spread across Catalonia, with 954 people working on them. The CIC provides these projects a legal umbrella, as far as taxes and incorporation are concerned, and their members trade with one another using their own social currency, called ecos. They share health workers, legal experts, software developers, scientists, and babysitters. They finance one another with the CIC's $438,000 annual budget, a crowdfunding platform, and an interest-free investment bank called Casx. (In Catalan, x makes an sh sound.) To be part of the CIC, projects need to be managed by consensus and to follow certain basic principles like transparency and sustainability. Once the assembly admits a new project, its income runs through the CIC accounting office, where a portion goes toward funding the shared infrastructure. Any participant can benefit from the services and help decide how the common pool is used.

A few blocks from Antoni Gaudí's ever-unfinished basilica, the Sagrada Família, sits Aurea Social, a three-story former health spa that has served as the Barcelona headquarters of the CIC (pronounced "seek") since February 2012. Past the sliding glass doors and the reception desk is a hallway where products made by members are on display—soaps, children's clothes, wooden toys and bird feeders, a solar-powered reflective cooker. There are brochures for Espai de l'Harmonia, a hostel and wellness center, where one can receive Reiki treatments or take aikido lessons. Beyond, there is a small library, a Bitcoin ATM, and offices used by some of the 75 people who receive stipends for the work they do to keep the CIC running. On certain days, Aurea Social hosts a market with produce fresh from the Catalan Supply Center—the distribution warehouse in a town an hour or so to the south, which provides this and the cooperative's other markets throughout the region with about 4,500 pounds of goods each month, most of which come from the cooperative's farmers and producers.

For years now Spain has been sunk in a perpetual downturn, with an unemployment rate exceeding 20 percent for the general population and hovering around 50 percent for those under 25. The exasperation has given rise to Podemos, a new populist political party that opposes austerity policies and is poised to displace the establishment. But the less-noticed side of this uprising is movements like the CIC, working closer to the ground and reshaping the structure of everyday life.

Affiliates can choose to live in an affiliated block of apartments in Barcelona, or at Lung Ta, a farming commune with tepees and yurts and stone circles and horses, where residents organize themselves into "families" according to their alignments with respect to Mayan astrology. Others move to Calafou, a "postcapitalist ecoindustrial colony" in the ruins of a century-old factory town, which Duran and a few others purchased after he found it for sale on the internet. (Further details about Calafou cannot appear here because VICE does not publish under an open license, a requirement the colony's assembly has for press wishing to cover it.) Not far from there, a group of anarchists runs a bar and a screen-printing studio in a building that once belonged to the CNT, the anarcho-syndicalist union that ran collectivized factories and militias during the civil war of the 1930s, orchestrating what is almost assuredly the modern world's largest experiment in functional anarchy. Like the CNT, the CIC is making a new world in the shell of the old—so the utopian mantra goes—and, to a degree that is not at all utopian, creating livelihoods for themselves in a place where livelihoods are not at all easy to come by.

If the taxman ever comes to CIC members, there's a script: They say that they're volunteers for a cooperative, and then point him in the direction of the Economic Commission, which can provide the proper documentation. (Officially, there is no such thing as the CIC; it operates through a series of legal entities, which also makes it less dependent on any one of them.) Insiders refer to their system, and the tax benefits that go with it, as "fiscal disobedience," or "juridical forms," or simply "the tool."

The office of the CIC's five-member Economic Commission, on the first floor of Aurea Social, doesn't look like the usual accounting office. A flock of paper birds hanging from the ceiling flies toward the whiteboard, which covers one wall and reads, "All you need is love." The opposite wall is covered with art made by children. The staff members' computers run an open-source Linux operating system and the custom software that the IT Commission developed for them, which they use to process the incomes of the CIC's cooperative projects, handle the payment of dues, and disperse the remainder back to project members upon request.

Accounting takes place both in euros and in ecos, the CIC's native currency. Ecos are not a high-tech cryptocurrency like Bitcoin but a simple mutual-credit network. While the idea for Bitcoin is to consign transactions entirely to software, bypassing the perceived risk of trusting central authorities and flawed human beings, ecos depend on a community of people who trust one another fully. Anybody with one of the more than 2,200 accounts can log in to the web interface of the Community Exchange System, see everyone else's balances, and transfer ecos from one account to another. The measure of wealth, too, is upside down. It's not frowned upon to have a low balance or to be a bit in debt; the trouble is when someone's balance ventures too far from zero in either direction and stays there. Because interest is nonexistent, having lots of ecos sitting around won't do any good. Creditworthiness in the system comes not from accumulating but from use and achieving a balance of contribution and consumption.

The idea was to help people out and radicalize them at the same time. The rich use tax loopholes to secure their dominance; now anticapitalists could do the same.

The CIC's answer to the Federal Reserve is the Social Currency Monitoring Commission, whose job it is to contact members not making many transactions and to help them figure out how they can meet more of their needs within the system. If someone wants pants, say, and she can't buy any in ecos nearby, she can try to persuade a local tailor to accept them. But the tailor, in turn, will accept ecos only to the extent that he, too, can get something he needs with ecos. It's a process of assembling an economy like a puzzle. The currency is not just a medium of exchange; it's a measure of the CIC's independence from capitalism.