And in revolutionary contexts I doubt most non-academic revolutionaries fully understand the mechanisms laid out in Capital

Agree, one doesn’t have to be a Marxist to be revolutionary (see also: anarchist comrades) nor does one need to be a Marxist to be class-conscious. But it would be incorrect to call such a person a Marxist.

Marx was basically using bourgeois theory to critique itself

Yes, Capital was a critique of political economy, but not an entirely negative critique. He accepted the LTV in its basic structure. The main difference was clarifying what kind of labor counts as the content of value. He did this by applying a dialectical analysis, going from the ~~particular to the~~ concrete to the abstract and again in the opposite direction^[I. I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value]. Only by doing this — in the process showing where in their analyses the earlier political economists went wrong — was Marx able to right the ship and arrive at the conclusions which now define Marxism.

*edited a brain fart, also added Rubin details