Blacks, workers, women, and youth struggling for freedom were not faceless masses to be led, she held, but the source of new stages of cognition because in their very actions was embedded a theory of human liberation.

[4] One example of this is the West Virginia Miners General Strike of 1949–1950, where Dunayevskaya pointed out that instead of merely demanding higher wages, the workers were asking questions such as, "What kind of labor should man do?"

The 1958 edition of Marxism and Freedom contained the first published English translations of Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and of Vladimir Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's Science of Logic.

Dunayevskaya believed the Communist state turned Marxism into its opposite – the totalitarian theory and practice of the Stalinist and post-Stalin USSR – and signaled a new stage of world "state-capitalism".

Marxism and Freedom presented an analysis of the USSR's economy as state-capitalist – rather than socialist, bureaucratic collectivist, or a "degenerated workers' state" – based on Marx's economic categories and official Soviet statistics.