Good chance Marx might be informative to read with a contemporary mind, but Engels seems like an absolute turd at any time.
much more on that here: https://fountain.fm/episode/E1LlHqfUE2xsr1AG7DEZ
Bard is pretty cool and this is the first time I heard this angle on Marx (roughly: he didn't write any of the Communist Manifesto - all Engels - and that if you read Marx is if he were a guy writing right now, you could appreciate his ideas differently, given that social and technological context today is so different than what he "had available to his thoughts" at the time. That said, I've never read Marx outside of the aforementioned manifesto)