War & Peace Quote by David Korten

Korten’s move is to steal a word capitalists love - “the market” - and pry it loose from “capitalism,” treating the pairing as a PR marriage rather than an economic law. The intent is polemical but strategic: if you can separate voluntary exchange from corporate power, you can criticize capitalism without sounding anti-commerce, anti-choice, or nostalgically socialist. It’s an argument designed for a culture where “free market” has been marketed as a moral identity.

The subtext is that what gets sold as neutral competition is, in practice, an engineered environment: concentrated ownership, regulatory capture, monopolies, intellectual property regimes, and political financing that converts wealth into policy. In that world, “market outcomes” aren’t just the result of consumer preferences; they’re the residue of power. Calling capitalism “the enemy of the market” flips the script on the familiar claim that government is the main distorter. Korten is saying the bigger distortion is internal: capital accumulates, and with it the ability to rig the supposedly open arena.

His second claim - capitalism as the enemy of democracy - lands because it names a tension liberals often sidestep: one person, one vote colliding with one dollar, one vote. The line implies that capitalism doesn’t merely coexist with democracy while occasionally corrupting it; it structurally pressures democracy toward oligarchy. Contextually, Korten’s activist background and the post-1990s anti-globalization critique sit behind this: NAFTA-era deregulation, corporate consolidation, and the sense that public institutions were being repurposed to serve investors rather than citizens.