>From memory here are some questions:
The underclass category itself collapses (see Herbert Gans, The War on the Underclass): most people so categorized have worked formally or informally within the last two years, so they do not stand outside of the working class while the category doubtless includes not only those who are not only caught up in non violent drug trafficking but those who actually only prey on the working class--that is, the lumpen proletariat. The category simply includes contradictory elements. I do however agree that the proletariat does not simply pick up an anti capitalist revolutionary consciousness; it can only be developed through long struggle. But this applies no more to the vast majority of the so called underclass than the formally recognized working class. I also agree that those who are inculcated to do the simplified, worse paying tasks of capitalist work from the earliest education on are often left without skill or disposition after the jobs for which they have been moulded have been automated or relocated. Most importantly--as you yourself underline--it is difficult to pin point which behavioral characteristics are actually unique to the underclass--so the attempt to define by behavior has turned out be a failed one as well.
Some have questioned whether the characteristics of the underclass are racialized (for example Sawhill's definition, I believe); that is the term has been invented to apply arbitrarily only to ghettoized blacks whose seemingly intractable and hopeless poverty is nontheless comparable to rural poor. The explanation for that arbitrary narrowing of the category of the underclass could simply lie in the functionality such stigmatization serves for human clearance in urban redevelopment programs. Of course the category is arbitrarily gendered--that is, in many tracts the category becomes synomous with an unemployed single mother of more than 1.89 children. The marital status of the women is held to be the efficient cause of the transmission of poverty; again this arbitrary definition of the underclass finds its explanation in the functionality it has had for cutting AFDC and imposing family caps and forcing those women to submit to men. I will leave it to you to figure out what more profane descriptions of black women are implicated in the description of them as underclass.
This politics for which Clinton and Murray must be forced to pay follows from Moynihan's diagnosis of the crisis of black America; at the time, the Moynihan report also justified enlisting black men into the military as a way of making them ready for family leadership so that dependent women could safely submit to them, create patriarchal families and transmit the values of proletarian discipline necessary to work one's way out of the ghetto. As Adolph Reed, Jr noted in a Radical America piece several years ago, that the recommendation came at a time of manpower shortages in the Vietnam War had quasi genocidal implications.
best, rakesh