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Notes -
You may be interested in some of what Steve Keen is writing these days, as he's very interested in making sure that core economics fully incorporates awareness of energy and stays consistent with the laws of thermodynamics. He also started out studying Marx and stumbling on a specific critique of his theory of value: that apparently in Marx's notes and earlier writing, he (seemingly correctly) had the source of capitalist 'value' as any place where you can get more use-value out of inputs compared to their exchange-value costs. But then Marx just turned on a dime at some point when writing Capital and declared that this only applied to labor (in a scientific way, assuming that 'fair' prices are paid for all inputs), seemingly just because he wanted to proceed with a classical labor theory of value.
I never read Capital, but followed along with David Harvey's lectures on it on youtube. It was interesting, and the use-value/exchange-value distinction is pretty useful. But it always seemed a bit confused and unrefined by mostly staying away from money and not quite knowing what questions to ask. Attempting to scientifically ask "where does value come from?" in 19th century industrial capitalism feels vague, where one was probably really wondering "how is it that all the companies in aggregate are perpetually profitable?" So compared to the lineage of classical/neoclassical econ, I much prefer the 20th century post-Keynes finance macro stuff that deals with actual money creation, balance sheet accounting, flow-of-funds analysis, etc., like Levy's "Where profits come from".
As for any current culture war angles for this, I think they've dwindled. 15 years ago I definitely encountered some status games in niche leftist communities where the marxists who could claim to have actually read Capital were 'real ones'. But the more distance we've put on since the financial crisis and even Occupy, the more any spiked interest has faded from Marx or people like Harvey/Zizek/Wallerstein/Alperovitz/etc. A lot of big story collapse narratives, from the falling rate of profit, to peak oil, had a 'final boss' big pillar where government deficit spending was somehow holding the house of cards together, and was about to topple. But people have rediscovered just how resilient that pillar actually is (and how important it's always been).
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