Wandering Through the Smell of the Capitalocene

Using an auto-ethnographic approach, this contribution reflects on the practice of wandering through the industrial port of Chimbote on the Northern Peruvian Coast as well as on experiencing the strong smell of fishmeal production in this city. Commonly referred to as “The Smell of Money”, it seems much more appropriate for me to call it “The Smell of the Capitalocene”. A smell that is itself another form of (toxic) waste, and, at the same time, the very symptom of a city that has been overlooked and discarded for decades. Chimbote serves as a symbol of the unequally shared realities of planetary modernity under global late capitalism. 1 “Humanity” is not responsible for the destruction of the planet as such. Responsible is the global economic system based on exploitation and destruction in some parts of the world for the prosperity of other parts. Resources and profits are being extracted from regions without any investment in or effort to build up the stability of those regions. The measurable and tangible effects of this destruction can now be summed up to mark our era – this is what can be called the Capitalocene (cf. Haraway, 2016 ; Moore, 2016 ) or even the Racial Capitalocene instead of the Anthropocene (cf. Vergès, 2019 ). Waste is part of this situation, and it must be understood as a symptom of the unequally shared planetarity based on exploitation and disposal. Wasting is “a social process through which class, race, and gender injustices become embedded into the socio-ecological metabolism producing both gardens and dumps, healthy and sick bodies, pure and contaminated places” ( Armiero, 2021 : 10). Within the huge thematic complex of the Capitalocene, waste is a material residue of this social process (and something is considered to be “waste” because it is “in the wrong place”, so to speak, and thus is being discarded).