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There were quite a few socialists of other types around during Marx’s lifetime. So his chief “modifications”, which circled around so-called “dialectical materialism”, appealed to atheistic socialists who thought they had an explanation of the world and history without God.

Marx’s chief moochee (to coin a pseudo-neologism) was Engels, or rather Engels’ father who was very rich and one of those terrible “capitalists”. In spite of all that help he got from Engels, he never thought of taking care of his family better—he did, after all, believe in “abolition of the family”.

To achieve his goal, Marx required two things: First, the total annihilation of all opposition, the downfall of all existing governments, all economies and all societies. “Then,” he wrote, “I shall stride through the wreckage a creator!”

The second thing he needed was a new kind of human being.

He visualized a regimented breed of Pavlovian men whose minds could be triggered into immediate action by signals from their masters. He wanted a race of men who would no longer depend upon free will, ethics, morals or conscience for guidance. Perhaps, without quite realizing it, Marx was setting out to create a race of human beings conditioned to think like criminals.

Producing such a race had been the dream of power-hungry men for more than 4,000 years. Nimrod had projected the design, Plato polished it, Saint-Simon sublimated it — now Marx materialized it.

Today, this breed of criminally-conditioned man walks the earth in sufficient numbers to conquer countries or continents, to change laws and boundaries, to decree war or peace. …

— The Naked Communist, Introduction, “The Rise of the Marxist Man”

Since you mention that the kind of man Marx was, and that the types of human beings who are most susceptible to his way of thinking fit the basic definition of criminals, I figured that the passage from the book that listed the 45 communist goals for the USA was apropos for this thread.