My issue with figures like Weber and Foucault and Bourdieu is that, to varying degrees, they don’t just obfuscate class analysis but they actively mystify it by turning it into something abstract.

One of the greatest ways that people, whether big figures in academia or the media or just laypeople, strawman Marx is by beginning from the presumption that Marx sought to detail every little thing in political economy and then they proceed to do things like going “Aha! Marx was a fool for he did not account for the individual who draws exactly half of their income by being employed and the other half from owning some sidehustle business. He doesn’t even have a name for a person who straddles his so-called classes. Ridiculous!” or “Aha! Marx failed to account for the fact that power exists outside of people’s relationship to the means of production. How shortsighted of him!”

But the thing is that Marx took a systemic analysis. He wasn’t trying to create special little titles for each minor graduation between proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie/bourgeoisie. He wasn’t particularly concerned with how an individual might straddle these categories because ultimately it doesn’t bear much relevance to his analysis whatsoever. Likewise he didn’t go into great detail about gender relations under capitalism because he was occupied with the system itself and in writing volumes of Capital.

I don’t think that Marx ever argued that his analysis of capitalism was the Theory of Relativity for political economy. When it comes to sociological matters there’s always going to be edge cases and odd little intricacies that cannot be accounted for in the way that a hard science can (mostly) do. That’s because people are complex and societies are astoundingly elaborate. There’s plenty that can be gained from understanding things outside of what Marx wrote and even from looking beyond Marx’s model, sure, but at the end of the day class conflict is the engine of society and it determines how we structure our lives and our world.