A set of modes of behavior and of attribution of social meaning, including forms of representation and communication, which began to be understood as a unity with the birth of the national market.
Culture is an ideological phenomenon which, encouraged by the bourgeoisie, allows it to carry out the "nationalization" -that is, the absorption into its program and under its leadership- of social classes with local interests -petty bourgeoisie, peasantry, artisans- or with universal -and therefore non-national- interests, such as the proletariat, within the political subject called the "nation".
To this end, the revolutionary bourgeoisie will not only create the concept of culture but will also homogenize languages, invent traditions out of feudal remnants and establish models of behavior tailored to the needs of the national market. For this purpose it will equip itself with artistic expressions, means of communication and even modes of representation.
The invention of culture
The concept of culture began as an Enlightenment metaphor: a person "cultivated" himself through study and access to knowledge, and, like any field, the more work and fertilizer went into that cultivation ("culture"), the more fruit it would yield.
It is with Fichte, Herder and the birth of German Romanticism that culture takes on an adjective for the first time and begins to be "national". It is no longer the reflection of individual exposure to knowledge, but a collective phenomenon: the reflection, common to all members of the national community, of a "popular spirit" (Volksgeist) that would travel through history, materializing the national essence over time.
The social process of education and that of nationalization become synonymous. It is a rigged argument: Fichte was fighting precisely to create an educational system that would produce nationals... so there would be none without state intervention.
But his strategy is that of a self-fulfilling prophecy: once the bourgeoisie takes political power, nationalization and education will be one and the same thing, a second genesis of man, in Herder's famous phrase.
From then on, the Romantic arguments will seem natural: we humans will have a cultural, and therefore national, second nature.
But let us remain on earth and consider, in its broadest generality, what nature, which must know best the end and character of its creature, sets before our eyes as human formation itself: it is nothing other than the tradition of an education towards some form of human happiness and way of life.
Man remains among men: he therefore cannot escape this forming or deforming culture; tradition reaches him and forms his head and shapes his limbs. As that tradition is, and as these are formed, so will the man be, so is he configured.
Herder, Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1791
The definition and exaltation of "national culture" was the "discovery" of the "DNA" of a new political subject capable of enveloping and involving all social classes: the nation.
National culture was the defining element of the nation, the mother of the essences of nationalism, the ideology of the rise of the bourgeoisie as a political class in Germany, the ideal greenhouse in which its social leadership germinated.
Culture and the petty bourgeoisie
Culture was fundamental to the nationalization of a petty bourgeoisie and a peasantry whose immediate economic interests remained, as was seen in the Spanish cantonal revolution, fundamentally local.
Thus, from its beginnings, "national culture" offered the petty bourgeoisie a leading role and funding through the arts, turning it into the plastic, architectural and literary interpreter of the national spirit, and therefore into the designer of the "popular" forms of national ideology and, to a certain extent, into the guardian of its essences.
State capitalism, "cultures" and "identities"
With the development of state capitalism during the 20th century, the state extended its policies of social control. And to do so it learned to think of those sociological categories that were useful to it as "political subjects". For example, in the 1920s "youth" became a political concept, and with it the first "youth cultures" were born.
In the postwar period, the development of the culture industry and of advertising would combine with the development of social policies, fractalizing those identities.
As a consequence, at the end of the 1950s in the United States and in the 1960s in Europe, youth, student, urban, neighborhood, migrant, women's... "subcultures" were "discovered". "Cultural identities" multiply within the national mold as the state makes ever finer the grain of the images on the basis of which it designs its policies.
In the monopolistic logic of state capitalism, all these categories also represent an opportunity for organizational regimentation, and every regimentation offers an opportunity for collective "representation": subsidies to the "social fabric", specialized technicians, participatory processes for the design of "public policies"...
There is no lack of incentives to organize discontent into a thousand identities that demand "recognition" and a space for new "representative" elites.
It is no coincidence that Sociology and "Political Science" are conceived in state universities as offshoots of a common trunk.
Culture and "class identity"
Some academic and historiographical schools, from E. P. Thompson to American postmodern historians, have tried to redefine class consciousness as an "identity" defined by a "working-class culture", shifting the "self-consciousness" of the class struggle -the existence of workers' struggles as workers- onto the placid terrain of cultural sociology.
"Culture", all that which makes it possible to recognize another as "someone of the same condition", would be the foundation of the "historical identity" of the workers.
Class consciousness would thus be settled in the territory that stretches from the lyrics of popular songs to the way one crimps an empanada, from commonplaces to the community practices of everyday resistance.
What the working class is capable of in political terms would be delimited by the projection of the values reflected in these practices and customs. Practices and customs which, like all culture under capitalism, are fundamentally national.
In this way the very idea of class consciousness is twisted and subverted in order, through the concept of culture, to nationalize the workers and bind them to national capital -even if this is usually done under the cloak of a rejection of the national bourgeoisie. We are at the antipodes of revolutionary thought, of course.
For Marx, the "historical identity" of the class, that in which its class consciousness consists, is nothing other than the program to which it is historically driven by the place it occupies in capitalist society. A program that is universal, identical in every country, like the wage-earning condition itself.
"Global culture" and imperialism
As an ideological expression of national capital, the independent development of national culture is born with an expiration date: it will only be possible as long as that of national capital is possible.
With the development of imperialism, the emergence of an "international culture" linked to the language and the "culture industries" of whichever imperialist powers are hegemonic at the time will call into question the supposedly "essential" and "national" character of the arts and customs.
However, this will in turn be reinterpreted and reused by nationalism as yet another "aggression" in the face of which to call for "unity" around the state and national capital in defense of "its culture".