I think that instability is surprisingly good for capitalists, however, I don't know if they "want" that instability. I live in Prague, and the instability and corruption following the fall of the iron curtain made many people very rich. It also allowed many western capitalists to buy assets in this country for very cheep prices. Right next to my house there used to be a park. Now there is an office building there. The city never built that office building, nor did it officially sell the land. Some corrupt official simply changed the title. Who can build a building like that and bribe an official? Not just anyone. You need money to build a building and bribe officials, so this chaos was very good for people with money. The same with the post office. Our post office has been privatized and is very profitably held by a Czech Billionair. How did that man buy the post office? Of course it was cheep at the time, and there was corrpution, but the main answer, is that he was able to buy it because he had money to buy it.
I suspect it depends on the kind of capitalist you are dealing with, industrial or financial.
Because while it seems financial capitalists thrive on instability, because this allows them to extract arbitrage, industrial capitalists are more likely to have their supply lines and similar disrupted.
I actually don't think it is that bad for industrial capitalists either. Afterall, a disrupted supply line often just means higher prices once the goods come through. You may be right that there is a distinction here but I think that "industrial capitalists" are rather rare. Few factories are owned by individuals anymore, they are owned by corporations, and those corporations are owned by stock holders. Perhaps direct ownership of factories is bad in times of chaos and that has meant that financial capitalists have gotten richer while industrial capitalists have gone bankrupt. I think that financial capitalists probably thrive best when society is stable for a time, when the capitalists can gather cash, and then unstable for a time, when the capitalists can go on a buying spree, buying things that are not normally for sale such as national post offices, and buying things bellow price.
To be clear I didn't mean to say that captialists caused the velvet revolution, I said that they benefited from it. While the post-revolution years were mostly peaceful, I don't think anyone could honestly say that they were stable.
> There was great sociopolitcal upheaval - and I might add most citizens where 'on the whole' good with it.
This is an extremely wrong interpretation of the revolution, which I myself was also a victim of for a long time. Czech people were very much for change, afterall, they were literally occupied by an army that used tanks to keep control https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW3LCclYoz4 (I'm sorry, I cannot find this video with English subtitles, it is the "last radio anouncement" from an independent Czechoslovakia on the day when Russian forces invaded.) The Russians didn't invade a captialist state, they invaded a totalitarian communist one.
The vast majority of Czechs are "good with" the idea of no longer being occupied by the Soviet Union. The majority of them are "good with" the idea of the Czech Republic being a capitalist state. The VAST majority are very much against the current political structure which is mostly manned by people who were in power before the revolution. To say that they are "on the whole good with it" is just wrong. Indeed, there is, on occasion, signs that there might be a second revolution, only, no one is sure which direction that would go (probably not towards communism... ), sadly, if it happens, it will probably in a nationalistic one. The "lets take care of our old people, break away from the EU, and impose strict laws and draconian punishments for anyone who is the slightest bit lazy or corrupt" is popular among a very vocal minority, which might just have the energy to gain power.
EDIT: Just to back myself up a bit with facts, only 2/5ths of the population or 38% thinks that things are better now than they were before the revolution. 17% thinks that things were better then, and the rest aren't so sure either way. That's pretty pathetic, really, when so few people are sure that they are better off now than they were under a totally insane totalitarian state. It's like asking "is it better to have corrupt capitalism or a pile of shit thrown in your face" and most respondents aren't clear on the answer to that question.
At the same time, %66 say that the revolution was a good thing. Afterall, who wants to be ruled by an occupying force?
