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.
I mean, it's not something with a few clear steps you can just follow, it's hard. And I don't really do it a lot.
Generally having serious discussions with other people who actually know their shit preferably in the context of a leftist organization is really good. Beyond that, you have to be well informed about the issue you are studying because you can't study something without having all the relevant information, and you have to pay attention to how that thing connects to the rest of society. The most important thing is finding the primary contradiction in something, or the most important element of the issue. What is the conflict that creates the issue and what are the forces at play? Where do these forces come from? Which one is more powerful?
Also, it is useful to not just read the really old classics, but also more recent stuff to get a better picture about the developments people have made, as well as see people employing marxist tools to analyze a problem. So you find an issue that interests you that a marxist theorist has already produced an analysis for, and you read that and you see how they approached it and how they used the methods. For instance, let's say fascism, where it comes from, how it manifests, what the classes involved are etc. On that subject you can read say Gramsci or Poulantzas (they're both super hard to read though, especially Poulantzas). Now Gramsci was writing as the phenomenon first emerged, which means a lot of what he said is obsolete but that way you can 1) see what communists thought about it as it first started appearing and how they tried using the tools they had to approach a new phenomenon they didn't understand well yet, 2) think about where his predictions and analysis maybe went wrong and why, but also get important insights because a lot of it is spot on and not obsolete at all. Poulantzas wrote Fascism and Dictatorship in 1974 so it was much better informed. Poulantzas is very good at delineating categories and making you understand the common elements as well as differences between things. So you read that and get a much better understanding and class analysis of the phenomenon, and he also cites the classics of marxism a lot so you can see what theoretical tool he is using at each moment. So, after you do that, you try to see how it applies to a modern wave of fascism, or think about how the conditions for fascism might arise. You think what KIND of fascism it is that you are seeing, IF what you are seeing is really fascism and not something else (is it fascism or is it more akin to an exceptional state?), and if it is, where does it come from? You also think about what is different from the old phenomenon described in the books and the newer phenomenon you are seeing, and you consider why that might be based on the different material conditions. You talk with other leftists about it and you read articles that modern leftists maybe wrote about it. And that way, you develop a good understanding of the phenomenon, what should be done about it, when it becomes a serious threat, etc.