Abstract: Throughout the history of the emergence and development of Marxist historical materialism, especially the thought in Marx’s later years, it reflects the shift of Marx’s basic methodology from essentialism to historicism. The historicism complements and improves the essentialism, making the historical materialism better and more complete, and more consistent with the reality of the human social system’s evolution. Combined with the essentialism methodology and historicism methodology, historical materialism is completely expressed as “generality and particularity” in four dimensions, and regarded as the general theory of human social economic system choice or the general standard to measure whether the system choice is appropriate. Using this general principle: Das Kapital is regarded as a typical case of Marx using his historical materialism to analyze the choice of capitalist private ownership from appropriate to inappropriate; Explain relatively better the success of different countries and nations in different stages of institutional selection or reform; In particular, it explain better the theory and practice of “simultaneous victory”, “socialism will win initially in one country” and “revisionism”, and the initial choice and reform of the economic system of socialist countries (including China).