You know it's kinda incredible someone could construct such a tortured conception of Marxism by way of a simple category error

Fun fact: most category errors are... semantic. Including many of those discussed by Marx.

I'm thinking your approach to disagreement is to just be unpleasant and act in bad faith until the other person decides it's not worth their time. And in defense, rely on obscurantism and straw men. Wouldn't want to reply to what the other person is actually saying, eh? This most recent reply doesn't directly address anything I said!

The issue isn't whether Marx used precise language (he obviously did); it's whether the core object of his critique is semantic

There's something you learn over time when you eventually become knowledgeable in one or more topics. Those who are naive, insecure, or simply unaware rely on obscurantist language. They love to use jargon in place of clear statements, directly as a substitute, to try and give the appearance of understanding, the appearance of belonging among the group they to become a peer in. Those who are secure, knowledgeable, comfortable in the topic? Yes they can use the jargon, but they try to do so for clarity, and do not rely on it to obscure.

Your comments consistently demonstrate the former, not the latter. The point is not clarity, but to be pedantic. Perhaps to simply avoid discussing what is actually at hand? You do seem to be averse to a direct conversation, to addressing what I actually say. Not just ignoring 90% of what I say, but then additionally taking the time to invent and respond to things I didn't. This quoted bit has both properties.

Precision in language: not a point I have discussed outside of you pretending at knowledge and constantly misusing socialist (and other) terminology.

Whether the core object of his critique is semantic: nah just quote me. What did I actually say about Marx and semantics? You are clearly averse to what I actually said, as it isn't that!

You suppose when Marx says something like, "Critics suppose [term] is [x], but it is actually [y]," he is making a semantic point about what a term means, he's not, you're conflating scientific correction with linguistic definition; that's a category error

See you don't even know what semantics is! In an example of pure irony, Marx often uses semantic points to actually point out category errors, that is literally what commodity fetishism describes. One of the things we're talking about. The commodities themselves do not truly have the properties with which they are allegedly imbued. Marx points this out: what does it mean when a commodity is ascribed those properties? Does it really have them? Can a commodity itself have them? Generally, no! Yet he critiqued political economy for doing so, for saying, say, that a commodity actually possesses value, obscuring the more accurate understanding that value is a "crystallization" of labor in production.

But why am I explaining this? You obviously don't care. You're belaboring the absurdly obvious point that Marx focused quite a bit on semantics to make his points, including the very first chapter of Capital. It's not a point even worth discussing, it's like you're trying to say the sun is purple and those who disagree are liberals. Is it a good use of time to tell that person what purple is and what a spectrograph might say?

When he corrects people on "value," he isn't saying, "Let's agree to define this word differently." He is saying, "You think value is a natural property of an object (like its weight), but I am proving to you that it is actually a hidden social relationship forced onto that object by the mechanics of capitalist exchange." That is a correction of scientific fact, not vocabulary

Now semantics is vocabulary...

"You say value is X, but it's actually Y" and you struggle and still think Marx isn't talking semantics.

You also confuse the presentation with the inquiry, another logical trap, the irony is Marx actually addressed this exact point in the Postface to the Second Edition of Capital. He distinguishes between his mode of inquiry (Forschungsmethode)

Oh do you want to have this discussion auf Deutsch to be extra pedantic? Vielleicht koennen wir. Oder nicht. Schade.

and his mode of presentation (Darstellungsmethode), the raw, chaotic, empirical reality of industrial England structured using a highly ordered, abstract, almost purely logical progression of definitions

More word salad. Nothing to be found here, it's not even connected to the premise you just presented. Forschung and Darstellung are not rejections of semantics in any way. You seem... deeply confused.

So yes, he uses a "lexicon-like" presentation because he is trying to peel back layers of a deeply confusing system. But the logic driving Chapter 1 is not the logic of language; it is the logic of the value-form as it actually evolved historically.

It is literally about defining the commodity, semantically splitting "value" to do so, and in the context of contemporary political economists' understandings, especially how those semantic category errors obscure the true relations. Can you read the title of Chapter 1 for me out loud? I wonder what Marx had to say about Ricardo and Destutt. Another way to tell newbies: they never read the footnotes.

Marx didn't invent the concept that abstract labor creates value; the historical development of the market economy invented it, and Marx is just mapping it

Tedious, irrelevant.

Also Marx did not create his lexicon out of whole cloth; it wasn't a personal or insular, his concepts: use-value, exchange-value, money, commodities, were the standard terms of classical political economy used by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Jean-Baptiste Say.

Tedious, irrelevant, though also not really correct. Marx did forward new meaning and language in some of those examples.

Marx's genius was not that he invented a new vocabulary, but that he took the existing vocabulary of bourgeois economics and showed that its internal logic logically led to crisis and exploitation, he didn't invent "surplus value" as a cool new word; he uncovered the actual, uncompensated hours of human sweat that bourgeois economists were hiding behind the word "profit."

More word salad. Now semantics is just inventing new vocabulary! Now we're discussing Marx's genius! Wouldn't want to discuss what I've actually said huh? Keep talking about literally everything else.

Also your assertion that "Ontology is virtually inseparable from semantics."

Oh you did eventually get around to mentioning something I actually said. Good job. Pat on the back.

while the new vogue in certain branches of modern linguistic philosophy completely misses the entire point of his materialist inversion of Hegel

I assume this was meant to be a complete sentence and thought but ended up as... whatever this is. Not parseable.

For Marx, social ontology (what exists) exists through physical human practice, completely independent of whether we have the language to describe it

Cool story what does it have to do with what I said?

A 19th-century child factory worker in Manchester didn't need to understand the "semantics" of surplus value, nor did the factory owner. The owner didn't have to read Marx to exploit the child; the objective, material pressures of market competition forced him to do it. The social relation happens in the physical world first. Language just plays catch-up

Look at how long it takes you to say simple things. How many words, how things must be injected for no purpose other than to give the trappings of familiarity.

Cool Marx described phenomena, description didn't create the phenomena. Wow. Oh amazing. I can't believe it. Blowing my mind here. Next you're going to tell me Newton didn't invent gravity. Give me time to recover first, though. And try to keep that revelation to fewer than 4 paragraphs.

Capitalism's distortions are real illusions generated by the material act of exchange, but that doesn't mean you overthrow the structural laws of capitalism through semantics; it will continue to function smoothly until the material relations of production are physically overturned

A straw man addressed in my previous comment. Just shameless behavior.