Does Capitalism Require Growth?

I just listened to a few speeches by David Harvey(a true socialist), and I noticed something in both his speeches and in the comments written by people who had watched these speeches. Profits were of course evil, many comments talked about how scarcity could be eliminated and capitalism seemed to be some sort of collective will that had a mind of its own.

Something that came up was that capitalism requires growth. I'm going to assume that material well-being is the issue here. If all exchanges in the economy are voluntary, then by definition all exchanges "grow" the economy, as voluntary exchange means all parties in the transaction think they'll benefit. In this sense capitalism can never do anything but grow the economy, so I doubt this is the meaning we're looking for.

The usual aggregate used when determining economic growth is GDP, so I'll use it too to make my point.

So does capitalism require a growing GDP?

To illustrate the fallacy here, let's take an improbable scenario of more leisure. What if people suddenly decided that they actually enjoy leisure a lot more than before and reduced the amount of work they do by 50%? Real GDP would certainly fall, society would still be capitalistic and people would be better off than before(if they weren't, they'd obviously go back to work). The economy would "shrink" and it wouldn't be a disaster(I'm excluding the transition period this would require, as this is an insane example anyway).

People who talk about growth as a requirement of capitalism usually focus on the capitalists(or sometimes they just talk about capital, as if capital by itself could act!) and they come up with these very imaginative stories about how the capitalists are running the show in some way because of that and that. Capitalists aren't a unified group with unified goals; as individuals they are simply a small part of the economy like for example every consumer, employer and employee is.

Capitalism has some prerequisites like private property and the freedom to exchange(otherwise it isn't capitalism), but it does not have wants, needs or goals.