This study reinterprets the 19th-century Wicksteed-Marx debate through Marx’s value-form analysis and historical materialism, revealing fundamental flaws in Wicksteed’s critique.Three critical failures are identified: (1) Conceptual misapplication: Wicksteed’s uncritical deployment of “abstract utility” erroneously transposes capitalist value forms to non-commodity societies, distorting Marx’s monetary dialectic. (2) Methodological reductionism: By substituting Marx’s historical “real human” with abstract individualism, Wicksteed conflates money’s intrinsic-extrinsic measures while severing the necessary connection between value’s causation and measurement. (3) A historical fetishism: His value-identity framework fosters conceptual reification, systematically obscuring the socio-historical genesis of economic categories like supply-demand and Deng Panyi

　　From: Philosophical Research. 2025. No.3.