From :  http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/chbilin2.html

Three Dimensional Organizing : Infrastructural Building
Within some 2,000 autonomous communities, the indigenous Zapatistas are taking proactive steps in developing the type of indigenous education that they feel they need now. Not only are they unwilling to wait for the Federal or State government to implement this type of education, but consider a reliance on the State to be an oxymoronic approach, since the state by definition is inherently incapable of creating and producing a pedagogy for dignity. Notwithstanding its inefficiencies, unwillingness, and ignorance, the state would like to see the indigenous dependent on a state that occasionally throws crumbs at them (Primera Declaración de la Selva Lancandona, 1994).
The heart of Zapatista approach is to take proactive initiative and to develop internal reliance with the aim of building infrastructures within the communities in the ultimate form of autonomous parallel governments. The autonomous method contrasts to the approach taken by many well-intended reformers who in an isolated (their classroom only) manner attempt to change their classroom conditions; curriculum, environment, books, etc. This individual approach does very little in terms of solving the problem at most they tend to treat the symptom. The Zapatista approach to change exhibited by their approach to education stands in contrast to "activists" who dedicate their life to changing the nature of systems of educational inequality through electoral and legislative means. The Zapatista method does not deny nor ignore the benefit of symptom treating or system changing attempts and may even involve themselves in this activity but they do it as a way to develop a third and principal sphere of activity; Infrastructural building.
Zapatista thought informs us that symptom treating and system-changing activities without the main activity of infrastructural building is in fact perpetuating the status quo. If one treats the symptoms of a faulty system without ever getting to the roots then one is involved in a form of perpetuating that faulty system. Similarly if one changes the system just enough to give the same system another lease on life, allowing it to absorb or co-opt the change then one is again involved in the perpetuation of that system. Zapatismo proposes that civil society go a step further and develop the infrastructure that allows autonomous free zones to define and build an alternative system of governance that for a time will co-exist with the old. This bottom-up development is something that the dominant system is incapable of carrying out, without it being at the cost of its own demise. It is in the interest of the dominant system that one not ever imagine that civil society can be involved in developing its own parallel government and infrastructure. This interest is projected and adopted by us daily, it is part and parcel of the curriculum of educational systems.
This dominator's ideological influence is so pervasive and effective that it is exhibited even in the forms of resistance and struggle for justice. The symptom-treating, system-changing activities are universally present in movements for social justice. Methods of struggle for social justice, as demonstrated in the struggle for the mere right to bilingual education in California, exhibit symptom treating and legislative system changing strategies but also exhibits the tendency toward the Zapatista proposal of infrastructural-building. That autonomous tendencies need to be complemented by the overall building of an autonomous community that would include its own micro-economic projects, and an autonomous political structure.
Application of Autonomous Pedagogy in the USA
Daily, in the Barrios and Ghettos of the U.S. everyone struggles but they do so as individuals. Daily we struggle for a just education, with teachers and principles, daily we struggle with our bosses at work or with our union bosses who don't work. At best our struggle is through an organized effort, an organization of parents, workers, students or teachers. But seldom have we gone beyond community or city-wide organizations to the level of self or autonomous government. The Zapatistas are proposing that we take critical theory to its logical conclusion. If the dominating state's purpose is to perpetuate itself then why should we expect it to reform and do otherwise?