p Historical materialism holds that there is no such thing as immutable human nature -man being the product of his time and, in a class society, a representative of a definite class. Social class distinctions condition the various historical types of 194 personality. Two types of personality that of the capitalist and that of the worker are typical of capitalist society. The capitalist is first and foremost the owner of the means of production. The worker owns no means of production. The worker’s personality is shaped in the process of his intercourse with fellow-workers and their joint struggle against the capitalists.

Despite society’s division into classes and the class roots of the personality, all people living in one historical age share certain features, like national character, culture, everyday habits and customs, etc., conditioned by life in the same society, common production relations, contacts, and reciprocal influences. Their intercourse and mutual influence, as well as common conditions of life, can result in certain changes in people’s social status and attitudes. For example, when a ruined peasant (or an out of work intellectual) becomes an ordinary workman, his social status. and with time his attitudes too, undergo a corresponding change, becoming essentially the same as those of other workmen. Accordingly, when a peasant grows rich or a worker’s son who has had a good education finds a lucrative job which in time makes him a stockholder or even a firm manager, he is bound to join the class of the bourgeoisie and to acquire a bourgeois psychology and ideology.