The Hold of Marxist Thought in Iraq: How Real? The Iraqi Communist Party made no actual presence in post-occupation years. With only one seat in Parliament, it is difficult to argue a Marxist hold despite a long history of popularity, struggle, and sacrifice. Apart from the miscalculated pragmatic participation in 2003 occupation authority management of the country, and the loss of a large number of sympathizers, the fact that the state sector was dismantled in order to open the door for neo-liberal economy is another blow to a left that was already wreaked since 1963. To put this loss in a historical perspective, this paper takes Mahmud Ahmad al-Sayyid’s and Husayn al-Rahhal’s understanding of capital and Marxism as a starting point to engage with the pitfalls in the communist movement as depicted in Baha al-Din Nuri’s Memoirs. As the Secretary General in the 1950s, Nuri considers subservience to Moscow the most devastating and demoralizing for a large number of members and cadres who were shocked by the growing rigidity that stifled literary and artistic effort and led to an impasse in Iraqi socialist thought. Existentialist thought thrived at the expense of this loss, and so did other trends.