What happens when we try to understand Marx out of his context? What is that context?

In my attempts to translate Marx into a form of essay easier to understand I came upon several roadblocks. Context was the worst of them. It was not just as easy as merely looking up a confusing word from the text in a dictionary and then injecting that definition in place of that word in the original text. All that did was give me sentences like: “It follows from all we have been saying up till now that the (of or relating to a small, often rural community whose members share work and income and often own property collectively) relationship into which the individuals of a class entered, and which was determined by their common interests over against a third party, was always a community to which individuals belonged only as average individuals, only in so far as they lived within the conditions of existence of their class…” Ick! Did that help anyone? It certainly didn’t help me any.
It is my opinion that the works of Marx is deeply contextual and that contributes to the difficulty in explicating it. It was virtually impossible for me to take anything he said completely out of context and make any sense of it. One of the things imperative to keep in mind when reading Marx is he is speaking to us from another time, roughly 1846 not to put too fine a point on it, another country, and perhaps most importantly from the midst of an entirely different economic and political structure than the one we were born and raised in.
Keeping this in mind it is easier to see Marx’s use of the word “communal” as found on page 21 (eighth paragraph) as including but not limited to the collectively owned sharecropping rural community. It is here perhaps we can find it appropriate to include the definition supplied to us by the American Heritage dictionary’s definition of commune as it offers us; the smallest local political division of various European countries.
We must do our best to stretch our minds to the context of mid nineteenth century Prussia.
I know this would have been of much more use for Monday’s assignment but for what it’s worth, as long as we’re talking context I found www.philosophypages.com/ph/marx.htm to be helpful when looking into the socio-economical structure of the time and Marx’s background.