Like how the do you “do” historical materialism? Or dialectical materialism? How the fuck do I look at a problem and then apply this method? What are the steps? Why is it so difficult to learn left theory? I feel like I have to fight people to learn because the first thing anyone will do is throw jargon at me. Like imagine you're trying to learn physics and everyone says you start by reading Einstein as if a beginner would even be able to understand what Einstein is saying, who he is responding to, what the concepts in his work are.
At some point once you think you understand a concept you actually try your hand at it. If you're studying calculus you'll do a bunch of problem sets and that actually helps you understand what it is that you're doing, how mistakes happen, and how to get better. How do I practice this skill? Every suggestion I see basically amounts to: read lots of stuff. And I don't see how this is different than just being a lib and reading a bunch of stuff and popping off with hot takes
Edit: kind of confused that there are lots of responses but no answer.
Simplification time. Ok let's look at diamat, first the dialectical part. In life things fundamentally change as time progresses, you could think of it as evolution of sorts, and like evolution it isn't such an easy to box into category change neither with just one single point. Hegel used an unfurling leaf and the process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly as examples in his work iirc.
To add materialism in how this is in the real world outside of the realm of idealism and perfection. What are the conditions simply. In the case of the caterpillar only once its reached a certain point of development with all the biological conditions met will it become a cocoon.
Historic - the past of something, path tends to be linear and roughly applied everywhere, idealist in the fact it considers history neat and no time considerations are truly considered.
Historic materialism - looking at the past critically, with what conditions were going on at that time and how that influenced development. May look at stages, categories are a lot more 'blended' since evolution of even our history phrases aren't neat but do have hallmarks unique to them.
Feudalism was its own precapitalist stage of society, peasantry had some sort of small means which got phased out, this was fought tooth and nail by kings against the bourgeois and peasants alike once conditions were met. We're not going to have feudalism just like 10th century ever again outside a time machine.
Hype word 'neofeudalism' simply because monopoly capital owns everything, we're not under the same technological nor class conditions, this is just further evolution of imperialist capitalism where the masses have nothing. So neofeudalism you can almost always dismiss when looking through a Marxist lens, but not under say many of the capitalist schools.
A really good example of unintentional diamat (usually) is the sciences especially anything with a big ol formula. Scientists by nature of their career do diamat on the bench, that's how it is when you look at something objectively with conditional consideration.