Pakistan’s economic crisis has renewed demands for national development, industrialization, and economic sovereignty, offered as solutions to persistent difficulties of capital formation, a limited industrial base, and stagflation since the 1950s. The neo-developmentalist turn of the 2010s expanded infrastructure financing and state-supported investment without resolving these historical problems, while integrating domestic production and public finances more deeply into international accumulation. Understanding this crisis requires examining the recomposition of capital through which financial claims increasingly shape productive activity and the conditions of everyday survival, while military and bureaucratic institutions consolidate their authority over investment and economic governance. 

Capital increasingly appropriates existing productive capacities and socially generated wealth beyond investment in new production. IMF adjustment and public debt establish claims over future government revenues, while energy-sector cost recovery transfers financial obligations onto households and productive enterprises whose incomes do not adjust accordingly. For Marx, industrial capital generates expanded value through production and circulation, a process grounded in the exploitation of living labour. Interest-bearing capital, by contrast, appears to generate more money directly from money, concealing how financial returns ultimately depend on claims over value produced through labour. Drawing on Gago and Mezzadra’s expanded conception of extractivism, Pakistan’s emerging neo-extractivist economy connects the extraction of natural resources with the appropriation of revenues generated through existing productive and reproductive activities.

The proliferation of digital financial infrastructure increasingly incorporates household transactions into financial circuits, while the expansion of consumer credit and household indebtedness enables financial institutions to secure returns through interest, fees, and repayment obligations. These developments extend capitalist appropriation across circulation and social reproduction, the everyday work of sustaining life and labour, enabling capital to obtain returns from productive capacities and cooperative........

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