Pakistan’s digital promise looks attractive on the surface. We hear the same confident language everywhere. Freelancing will lift incomes. Content creation will open doors. Digital skills will move Pakistan into the future. Young people in Lahore, Karachi and Peshawar are editing videos at night, tagging images for artificial intelligence in the morning and pitching to clients across borders. It feels like a new industrial revolution. But when I look at this landscape through a Marxist lens, I see a structure that is old in its logic even if new in its appearance.

The scale of what is happening is very large. Government reports and industry data suggest that over 2.3 million Pakistanis are active in freelancing and digital services today, ranking the country among the top freelancing markets globally. Experts say these workers could soon generate more than one billion dollars in annual earnings if current trends continue. This remittance and export income is becoming an important source of foreign exchange for Pakistan. Yet only a small portion of this labour is formalised through banking, contracts or legal protections. This is not just a statistic; it is a map of vulnerability.

Remittances from freelancers already make a visible impact. In the current fiscal year alone, Pakistan’s freelancers are estimated to bring in around $500 million in foreign exchange, with projections to grow further as more people join the digital economy. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s broader IT and IT‑enabled services........

© The Friday Times