This paper offers the related concepts of 'caring' and 'commoning', borrowed from feminist technoscience and feminist political economy, as both values for design and analytical lenses to scrutinize computer-cooperative infrastructures for activist interventions. The paper draws on the empirical work conducted in a European participatory design project confronting risks of social exclusion that result from precarious labor conditions increasingly affecting the European populations. We discuss how the combined concepts of caring and commoning present alternatives to capitalist accumulation, supporting activist and emancipatory aims by shedding light on dimensions related to work, affects, and politics.

Recently, HCI scholars have started questioning the relationship between computing and political economy, with both general analyses of such relationships, and specific design cases describing design interventions. This paper contributes to this stream of reflections, and argues that IT designers and HCI scholars can critically engage with the contemporary phase of capitalism by infrastructuring the emergence of new institutional forms of autonomous social collaboration through IT projects. More specifically, we discuss strategies and tactics that are available for IT designers embracing an activist agenda while infrastructuring autonomous social collaborations. We draw on empirical data from an H2020 EU funded project -- Commonfare -- that seeks to foster the emergence of alternative forms of welfare provision rooted in social collaboration. In this context, we discuss how the necessary multiple relations that unfold in a project with such ambitions shape both the language and the technologies of the project itself.