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.
Check out Theory as History: Essays on Modes of Production and Exploitation by Jairus Banaji or origins of capitalism by Ellen meiksons wood, or passages from Antiquity to Feudalism by perry anderson or for more modern problems any of Mike Davis' books. All are sustained exercises and really good examples of doing historical materialist analysis.
Don't overthink it, the point is to look at history as the product of material conditions. Now this does not mean ignoring ideology, far from it, but it means we look at history not as series of spontaneous events in the minds of people, but as a product of physical and social forces influencing people.
Now no particular history doing historical materialism means it is right, many are wrong lol. It just describes a position one takes on how history happens, and that informs what should be studied. There can still be gigantic rifts and arguments between historical materialist historians and political theorists on important issues like the origins of capitalism, the nature of the state, politics, imperialism etc. There's especially disagreements over political theory. For example someone in here recommended Poulantzas. Poulantzas, who is a great writer, started as a leninist but then came in his own analysis to reject it. He also wrote a lot about the state and had a series of heated debates with Ralph Miliband about it. Both he and Miliband were historical materialists, but had very different ideas about what the specific material things they were arguing about were. The debate between Poulantzas readers and people like the late Leo Panitch who was influenced a lot by Miliband continued to this day (rip Leo, he died last month).
Dialectical materialism to some people just means historical materialism. To others, it means a wider application of dialectical thinking, things like Engels laws of dialectics he cribbed from Hegel, to physical forces in nature (to me, doing this is kind of useless though, it's just ad-hoc labeling of things as contradictions and that's not really useful for learning new information than not doing that and using some other system to label things).
Here's a short explanation of one perspective on Marx's historical materialism Eric Fromm wrote in the early 60s: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fromm/works/1961/man/ch02.htm