Dialectic can never be a science, you can't apply the same methodology. Even when it's material.
However it is philosophy, and if your searching for some material reality then it's ontology.
Science too is a product of ontology, it's a methodology created for this exact purpose and wich can be studied in this field.
Saying physical properties are social abstractions sounds to me like social constructivism, which is epistemology, again philosophy.
Social sciences can be soft science precisely when they are not dialectic and rely on the methodology of science.
And to be clear, soft science is just a science that is based on a hard science, in which we don't have enough work done to explain every emergent properties using fundamental properties of matter.
Psychoanalysis is an outdated philosophical theory, so indeed just a scam now.
I went on a tear at one point trying to really understand, rigorously (I'm a computer and maths person by trade and training), what dialectics are and how, specifically, the material dialectic (the foundation of Marxist thought!) should work.
I was a bit dissapointed to understand that they can't really be "rigorous" in that fashion and that they're really more of a philosophical and rhetorical tool. I do still get a lot of use from them, and in discussions with other people the framework of the dialectic ("Ok, what if we took these two ideas and put them on opposite ends of a spectrum, how does that look?") is very useful for explaining and expounding upon ideas.
Its usefulness never made me disappointed despite this drawback.
I'm a physicist at heart, which might explains it... To me the use in philosophy is just as important, especially in philosophy of science and metaphysics.
Simply put I couldn't imagine studying how reality works without ever wandering what it is and how to best study it.
In that it ignored the previous half a century of (well tested) advances on the area and just made claims that were already known not to hold on the real world.
For example, the entire labor theory of value doesn't hold up on the real world and Economics had already better explanations for the phenomenon it was trying to explain.
What part of Marx's LTV doesn't hold up? What theories explain Value better?
Are you capable of specifics, or can you only gesture? I am genuinely trying to see if you have an actual argument, I'm a Marxist and I encourage you to point to something that could maybe test that.
None of the LTV hold up. For a start, it predicts that people won't ever trade. That's quite a big flaw because, you know, people do trade. Theories of value predicting people won't trade was a big problem by the time Marx was young. His one doesn't solve the problem at all, but well, it wasn't a problem anymore when he published.
The family of theories of value that predict that trade happens are called "subjective theories of value".
None of the LTV hold up. For a start, it predicts that people won't ever trade
What on Earth are you talking about? Do you know what "Exchange-Value" represents? Can you point to that in Marx's writings? If this is your best, then you need to read more of Marx before you randomly start pretending it's debunked or outdated, lmao.
Labour theory of value puts value on goods for the sole purpose of trading and explaining trades. Both LTV and STV does.
Marx's use of LVT is to criticize how Capitalism leads to exploitation. But although the specifics differ SVT could still be used to raise the same critiques.