Marx said that man changes himself in the process of changing his circumstances.
How does this concept apply in the light of the need for a communist society of which we now must expect something more than in Marx's day? Then, a communist society meant the abolition of the alienation of humans from the product of their labor, and an end to the alienation of humans from each other due to their enforced competition on the capitalist market to sell their labor-power. But a communist society, now, has not only to overcome alienation, but to do so without creating ecological instability.
Humankind has the unique capacity to proceed by way of analysing a situation, projecting into the future a complicated set of clrcumstances which we can call a perspective or a plan, and then steadily to "work" as we call it to transform the present into that plan which he or she has projected.