Woj I am disappointed.
When you use a word like "life styles" you are suggesting that the life we lead is something we choose, in the same way that when shopping we choose an old fashioned style, or a youthful style, or a goth style.
I don't think people choose to live in slums. I really don't.
As for their behavior....it covers a spectrum as with all people.
[WS:] I fundamentally disagree. I think all people have and do make choices - regardless of theier social status and circumstances. Some of those choices may be more difficult or costly or less desirable - but everyone makes them, either by explicit "commission" or by omission or default. This is probably one of the most fundamental principles of human agency.
It is only in politically or ideologically driven mythology that this human agency and the ability to make choices is denied. Dictators and bosses often hide behind "historical necessity" or "market forces" to hide their role in making decision that others judge less than desirable or atrocious. In the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiments the participants believed that they "had no choice" but to go ahead with the procedure, at least until one of the participants said that he did have a choice and walked out of the room.
Likewise, poor people have choices. The range of these choices is obviously different than that of more affluent folk - but it entails different *feasible* alternatives regarding place of residence, friends, partners, activities, or employment. The fact that someone was born to a particular set of circumstances does not mean that he or she has to stay in that set of circumstances if he/she chooses not to - at least in Europe and North America. Some of those choices may require more cost or effort than other and some people may be unwilling to incur that cost or effort - but they are making a choice by not engaging in a pursuit that is available to them.
Moreover, even if people's life styles are uprooted (e.g. through relocation) - people tend to rebuild the life styles that they like or are familiar with - even those that other may label undesirable or dysfunctional. This is true of personal relationship e.g. when people rebuild the same dysfunctional or abusive relationships that they previously left, emigration - either internal or cross national - when people bring their old countries and lifestyles with them and choose to rebuild them in the new place instead of adopting the host country's life styles. This is also true to refuse to leave their trailers parks or ghettos - even though such life styles may be derided by others.
This brings us to the crux of the matter - the lumpen life styles are only problematic to people who do not live those life styles - the middle class conservatives who despise them, or the liberal/left wing intelligentsia who also dislike them but do not want to admit it. However, the lumpen life styles are not problematic to lumpen themselves - and they generally refuse to give it up, even if they can or are prodded to.
The problem that the liberal intelligentsia has with the lumpen is the perennial problem of the religious missionary - he wants other people to adopt a life style and values that he devised for them and becomes frustrated if they refuse and stick to their old ways. The right-wing response to that frustration is the condemnation of the target populations. The left wing response, by contrast, is the condemnation of the target population's environment. The right wing missionary says "they failed to convert to what I think is desirable because they are immoral lazy and stupid." The left wing missionary says "they failed to convert because they have no choice due to external circumstances."
However, it needs to be underscored that both the right- and left-wing missionaries share the same lack of acceptance of the choices that other people make and they both attempt to rebuff those choices - the right wingers by morally condemning them, the left wingers by denying their existence. They refuse to acknowledge that other people simply chose not to embrace the life style or values that they value and opted for something they consider inferior - and they explain away the people's choice either by morally condemning it (as "moral depravity" or "false consciousness") or denying that choice altogether.
My own position on this issue is live and let others live. There are things about the lumpen that I dislike, but this is their lives not mine. So as long as their life styles - chosen either consciously by deliberate commission, or by default or omission - do not infringe on the lives of other people, I have no problems accepting them, just as I have no problems accepting other people's taste in food, art, or sexual behavior that I would not choose myself.
Wojtek