I don’t know about the provenance of this exact quote, but Engels said similar things in some of his polemics. Specifically, he railed against people who applied dialectical materialism in a mechanical way, as a sort of algebra of history, and didn’t bother to really look at facts on the ground or see situations in their proper nuance. Negation of the Negation has some line like: “Knowledge of the general categories of history no more enables me to understand history than knowing the principle of overtones and proportional division of a string enables me to play the violin.”

So there’s a chance the Marx quote is genuine.