Every year, more than one million Nepalese citizens go abroad for work, study or other purposes. If we take the 2024 data as a reference, this number has reached 1.68 million. In our society, it is considered a matter of pride and sometimes ‘humble bragging’ is commonly used in conversations. Some parents are proud, some are disappointed, some are a mixture of both. Analytically, people prefer to interpret the migration of millions of Nepalis abroad as a failure of the system and the weakness of the government. However, the reality is different, people going abroad is not a failure of the government but a set goal.

We often complain about Nepal’s weak export capacity. However, Nepal actually has one strong export, which has borne the burden of the entire economy of Nepal. That export is the wage slave. For a long time, Nepal’s youth have become the biggest and most successful export for the government. Our rulers, bosses and managers have played a long game of ‘soft power’ and relentless propaganda, so that today it has become a common thing for families to send their beloved children abroad as slave laborers and take pride in it. The lack of opportunities is a deliberate decision by the bourgeoisie to increase the rate of ‘slave labor’ export, as a result of which more and more Nepali citizens are leaving the country every year.

The question may be asked why our government does this. The answer is actually very simple, the government serves capital, not the people. Let’s look at some facts – Remittances are the backbone of the Nepali economy, which has reached more than 25 percent of the country’s GDP. These conditions created for labor export are planned. We are living in a state of ‘state-managed underdevelopment’, where the actions, policies and structural inefficiencies of the government deliberately inhibit economic growth and keep the country in a state of perpetual dependency.

The Nepalese government has shifted away from producing physical goods and towards managing the export of its primary commodity – human labor. Let us understand the dual nature of this commodity. For the capitalists of the destination country, the ‘use value’ of Nepali workers’ labor power lies in its ability to create value and profit in the production process. In other words, Nepali workers’ sweat produces goods on foreign soil, but the workers have no right to the dividends of that product. Its ‘exchange value’ is the wages that the workers receive in return. In this way, by keeping our factories and fields barren, the state has turned the youth into ‘raw material’ for foreign industries.

We often complain about Nepal’s weak export capacity. However, Nepal actually has one strong export that has borne the burden of the entire Nepalese economy. That export is the wage slave.  This exchange value paid to workers in the form of wages is sent home in the form of remittances, which becomes the financial link with Nepal’s internal economy. It is mainly used to purchase imported goods. This creates a never-ending cycle, where labor is exported to earn the foreign currency needed to pay for imported goods. The ‘surplus value’ is created entirely at the point of production, which is then exploited by foreign employers. However, this surplus value is later distributed externally – manpower companies take their share through recruitment fees and service charges, while financial institutions and the state take another share through remittance transfer fees and interest on the loans taken by workers to go abroad. The worker is exploited from the start and is already exhausted by the time they return home.

This creates a clear and shared class interest between the manpower industry, the politicians who support them, and the banks that profit from remittances, to send more and more workers every year. As long as wages abroad remain more attractive than in Nepal, the manpower industry has a reason to interfere in prosperity and development projects through ‘lobbying’. Mechanisms like recruitment fees that trap workers in debt before they reach their destination, contract changes at the destination airport, and the ‘kafala system’ in the Gulf countries keep Nepali workers legally tied to their employers.

So what does all this mean? It means that Nepal is not underdeveloped because it cannot develop. Rather, our unique position in the world economy has forced us to remain underdeveloped. This is not Nepal’s problem alone; throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, imperialist powers have always maintained their power through local ruling classes. In the case of Africa, we can consider Western Europe as the source of imperialist enforcement. But Nepal is a semi-colonial country, where our ruling class works in concert with various imperialist powers. Our rulers or managers are not independent actors engaged in national development, but rather a class of ‘broker-capitalists’ whose wealth and power derive from managing Nepal’s dependency.

In this process, Nepal is not only losing its workforce, we are losing something bigger – the possibility of a political system that can take root. Workers who are angry about the conditions in their workplaces cannot protest in Nepal. The population that is always ‘elsewhere’ cannot demand anything here. Not only that, they are not even allowed to vote. The very people who keep the economy of this country alive are being systematically excluded from all political processes.

If people are forced to emigrate, the government should subsidize this process and end the middleman system. Looking at the self-interest of manpower entrepreneurs, it is clear that they do not want the country to develop. Exploitation of workers is not their concern, their only concern is how much profit they can make. In addition to removing the middlemen, if the government really cares about its citizens, there should be strict regulation when sending workers abroad. This should ensure that they do not fall into any kind of ‘slave contract’ and the government should intervene to bring back workers trapped in the kafala system. Failure to do so reaffirms the character of our state - a bourgeois state that does not care about workers.