Karl Max belonged to a area where there were limited opportunities in a primarily agrarian economy with wide spread exploitation, information dissemination was difficult and people with power had a out sized influence over common man.
It was relevant at that time and it is not great to see him ridiculed with a modern day lens
I never said that he wasn't relevant at the time. I simply think he was/is overrated. Even put in historical context, he was overrated. Certain of his contemporaries were better socialist theorists. And Marx was arrogant and dishonest, imo. His critique of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy, for instance is just blatantly intellectually dishonest. He intentionally misrepresented Proudhon's ideas, and even misquoted him at times. While being bourgeois himself, he criticized working class socialists for being bourgeois. And even when new developments showed that orthodox Marxism was obsolete, he refused to really revise his theories much. I mean, Marx and Engels both knew Eduard Bernstein and were familiar with his approach. Marx seems to have been a man of low moral character and to have been a bit egotistical. People should still read Marx, but they shouldn't place as much emphasis on him as they do. They should study pre-Marxist socialism too. People should focus more on the forgotten socialists, Blanc, Blanqui, Saint-Simon, Proudhon, etc.