Marxism has been a popular paradigm for writing the history of political economy in the Middle East. Studies of labor movements, landownership, and the economic backgrounds of twentieth-century-political party leaders and members have come to form a central corpus of scholarship on the region, especially in its colonial and post-colonial phases. However, Karl Marx's evolving critiques of capitalism, and commentaries on current events were formulated roughly between the 1840s and the early 1880s, a time period that coincided with the deepening of the Middle East's integration into the World Economy. While his views of the "Orient" (for example, as popularized in his 1850s-articles on British-ruled India) reflected a limited awareness of nineteenth-century non-European contexts, he understood capitalism as an expanding global phenomenon. Therefore, especially in light of recent intellectual histories and biographies that insist on situating Marx within his nineteenth-century European environment, it seems apt to read his ideas as they evolved in relation to contemporaneous capitalist processes in the Middle East, which, in turn, were inseparable from the political and economic transformations taking place in Europe. This paper will look specifically at a dispute between silk weavers and their guild masters in Cairo in 1872. Its starting point is a close reading of the legal documents generated in relation to the dispute, and currently preserved in the Egyptian National Archives. This reading will shed light on how these historical actors understood their roles and relative power in relation to each other, and in relation to the larger market that they inhabited. The paper will then zoom out in order to contextualize this dispute in light of recent scholarly findings on mid-nineteenth-century legal and economic institutions such as credit enterprises and merchant courts. In conclusion, the paper will question the extent to which Marx's contemporaneous understanding of the process of production in a nineteenth-century capitalist context sheds light on this small-scale dispute that unfolded away from the European metropoles.