We've all seen the future, which is the problem.

A forthcoming event in Manchester, the FutureEverything Conference (May 13-14) seeks to explore the future in all its myriad streams: crowdsourcing, social networking, Twitter, and databases, to answer questions like what will be the next Wikipedia.

There is a constant interest in the future in modern media, with the onrushing progress of internet technology throwing up a series of big new names over the past 15 years in a process of constant fertility: Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, Google, Slashdot, LiveJournal, Wikipedia, Friendster, YouTube, Myspace, etsy, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, iPhone, Latitude... All of these promised or promise to change the way we live, the way we (a more nebulous we) do business, the way we are made to buy things and the way we might be able to sell them. We are told there is more around the corner; while many things like Twitter and Facebook appear of uncertain value at first, there's always a chance they'll prove useful, or like cigarettes their value might have no relation to their popularity.

And yet it's a constant theme of postmodern and recent Marxist thought that there is (for people today) no future and no past: what marks the present age is a total absence of history, of the future. Fredric Jameson has launched a quixotic battle to preserve the dying concept of Utopia - following the failure of Marxism and the dreams of the 60s counterculture, it seems nobody has any idea of a better society; the idea that the future will be different from the present has been almost entirely closed off, and utopian thought is vanishing the same way as the idea of medieval chivalry.

Today, there is little sense of the past, of history. Narrative is reduced to a series of moments, a list such as the one I made earlier. A list contains no idea of logical connection, of historical agency, of progress, of will, of conscious choice or motive, or of dialectic. Modern media is focussed on the momentary and the stream of moments - the Flickr photostream; Twitter; the website status updates that preceded and followed it; geo-tagging and location tracking; shared amateur and professional video clips from falling-down dogs to moments excerpted from classic films; RSS streams, aggregation, and the jumble of Google News.

It is possible to suggest a story in a twitter post or a photograph, but such a story will always be tenuous and insubstantial, lacking necessity. A photograph frozen in time, even if it is clear what happened next from your external knowledge and internal clues, denies the certainty of history. It is always possible to halt time, to make things otherwise. A photograph obliterates history. Even a video clip is only the most shallow and sensational version of history - someone falls off a table, someone shoots JFK in the head - leaving more questions than answers. Only the understanding of historical processes can truly explain where we have come from and where we are going, and that is something for which there seems little appetite - because we focus our attentions on the future, a future (the next Twitter, the next YouTube) that inwardly we know offers nothing but more of the same.

How to hate the working classes

Walter Benn Michaels reviews Who Cares about the White Working Class? edited by Kjartan Páll Sveinsson in the London Review of Books, and he feels the authors have started in the wrong place. For the last 40 years there has been a movement from class-based politics (Marxism) to identity politics (feminism, anti-racism, gay rights, etc). He considers how the division between rich and poor is being ignored by many people, and when it is given attention it is considered as another form of identity politics. Nice liberals condemn the mocking of the poor (chavs, Jade Goody, etc), but this application of identity politics is focussing on the wrong thing: opposing how the working classes are regarded and ignoring their poverty. American universities are more elitist than ever, more home to the wealthy. As blacks, women, and gays become more equal with heterosexual white males, we're facing a world where injustices are "produced not by discrimination but by exploitation".

Michaels claims identity politics is antithetical to class-based politics - the former will be satisfied when "[i]f about 1.5 per cent of your population is of Pakistani descent, then ... 1.5 per cent of every income quintile is Pakistani", the latter wants the entire working class, black and white, to be better off. Identity politics doesn't merely deflect attention from attacking economic inequality, it create phoney solidarity e.g. between rich blacks and poor blacks, or rich women and poor women, making class conflict less likely. For a long time Marxists have accused the west of using nationality in a similar manner, so that national interest is placed ahead of class interest, which means the needs of the poor are not addressed.

An obvious question, then, is how we are to understand the fact that we've made so much progress in some areas while going backwards in others. And an almost equally obvious answer is that the areas in which we've made progress have been those which are in fundamental accord with the deepest values of neoliberalism, and the one where we haven't isn't. We can put the point more directly by observing that increasing tolerance of economic inequality and increasing intolerance of racism, sexism and homophobia – of discrimination as such – are fundamental characteristics of neoliberalism. Hence the extraordinary advances in the battle against discrimination, and hence also its limits as a contribution to any left-wing politics. The increased inequalities of neoliberalism were not caused by racism and sexism and won't be cured by – they aren't even addressed by – anti-racism or anti-sexism.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing.

The war against modern poetry

The 20s and 30s saw a flourishing of experimental, modernist poetry, often with marxist or left-wing politics. According to Al Filreis's book Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, this all changed after World War Two when conservative critics launched a counter-attack; they reasserted a more traditional form of poetry based on the lyric and expressing emotion, helping to kill off literary experimentation and ushering in a post-ideological age. Two reviews, by Charles Bernstein and Sarah Ehlers (pdf) explain Filreis's argument, and largely agree with it.

Ehlers explains how

in the middle of the 20th century, conservative critics decried experimental verse forms in an attempt to destroy the modernist avant-garde and to undo its associations with the Left. Yet by treating modern poetic experimentalism as a form of communist subversion, and by privileging a traditional lyricism defined by individual expression and reflection, it appears that these critics effectively convinced American audiences that poetry and politics don't mix.

The anti-communist critics, such as Stanley Coblentz's League for Sanity in Poetry, attempted to remove the politics from earlier poets. They rewrote the history of poetry to their own ends, turning Whitman from a radical socialist (and homsexual) into a nationalist, an epic poet to match Virgil or de Camoes, and used attacks on poetical experimentalism to discredit the political views of the largely left-wing experimental poets of the 1920s and 30s.

The anti-communists focussed on the difficulty and non-accessibility of modernist poetry, using its apparent rejection of the mass audience to discredit it: modernist poetry became an enemy of the public. The conservatives feared modernist poetry's rejection of hierarchy, with Donald Davidson condemning paratactic verse for its "treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists." (AF) Bernstein points out the contradiction that leftist writers were often seen as democratic, yet in the 1950s left-wing modernist forms were accused of elitism and anti-populism.

Traditional lyric poetry was seen as staying true to individual emotions, while modern verse was about abstractions. The 1950s anticommunists used similar language to that of Hitler's art criticism: "The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed 'in a phrase: it was an alien growth' ... 'poison'" (AF). Lucien Burman condemned Gertrude Stein's influence "still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection."

As the conservatives tried to shape poetry to their will, modernists were accused of imposing critical orthodoxy and perpetrating a "Big Lie": the lie that their work was poetry at all. Coblentz claimed modernist leftists would use the state security apparatus to impose their poetic ideas on the nation. Pinnacle, the magazine of the League for Sanity in Poetry, compared modernism to genocide. Peter Viereck linked the modernist "anything goes" philosophy with totalitarian mass murder.

The effects of this conservative campaign were long-lasting. 1950s magazines like Poetry refused to publish new verse by writers with radical politics even if the poets had been previously published there. Many poets saw their reputations ruined. The critical landscape shifted from the radicalism of the early 20th century to the system we now have. Bernstein sees traces of the anti-modernism persisting, in a belief that mainstream aesthetic principles are common sense, and a continuing pressure towards non-ideological poetry that accepts the dominant norms; the literary establishment claims that the avant-garde has won, as an excuse to say experimentalism's time has past.

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It is common on the left to explain post-ideological traditionalist poetry and literature as an inevitable product of late capitalism, but the account given by Filreis seem to show that contemporary ideas about poetry were creations of people with a specific political program and perhaps not historically necessary. It also shows how decisions about the literary canon often reflect political needs; battles over the interpretation of classic poets are frequent, and it can be seen here that they often have very high stakes.

Filreis's work follows earlier studies such as Who Paid the Piper?: CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders (Reviews Monthly Review; CIA) which described how the CIA and other anti-communist organisations funded journals such as the Partisan Review, promoted writers such as George Orwell, and most famously supported abstract expressionism. The influence of these policies is debatable; while some people claim abstract expressionism was otherwise worthless and its valorisation is all a CIA plot, a more measured response sees the CIA as attempting to shift the world's cultural balance from Europe (with its strong left-wing tendencies) towards the USA. Promoting abstract art also damaged the left-wing representational art that had been popular in public contexts in the 1930s and 40s, funded by New Deal money, with the many followers of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, and black artists like Jacob Lawrence. And art is not a matter of isolated geniuses: they require money, often from government or institutional sources (most American poets seem to earn their living through universities), but also a supportive creative and critical community.

There was certainly debate in the 1950s as to whether anti-communists should fund the abstract expressionists or more traditional artists, so it's noteworthy that in poetry the opposite side seemed to win compared to what happened in painting. And now we have an art world dominated by abstraction and conceptualism, and a literary world that seems shy of experiment. Cultural history often seems to conservatives to be a history of great men and women, and to those on the left as a story of historical inevitability under the wheels of capitalism, but Filreis shows that neither view is sufficient, and literary reputations and the success of artistic movements often hinge on political expediency and decisions that have little to do with art.