Marxism - Leninism is an ideology, a socio-political and philosophical doctrine about the laws of the struggle to overthrow the capitalist system and the building of a communist society. From the point of view of his followers, he developed Lenin, who developed the teachings of Marx and applied it in practice.

Lenin belonged to the supporters of Marx's "purification" of the elements of the unscientific "speculative philosophy." Lenin did not think that something retreats or adds to the ideas of Marxism something substantial. In Marxism-Leninism, the method of materialistic dialectics received an addition in the form of an orthodox view, the slightest deviation from which was considered revisionism and punished

In the course of this evolution, Marxism-Leninism acquired a number of the following basic elements.
1. dialectical materialism, which Marx himself was not described;
2. historical materialism, as Marx himself preferred to call his social philosophy (some theorists were included in dialectical materialism in the late 1970s and interpreted as extending the principles of the latter to the sphere of social phenomena);
3. the political economy of capitalism - a critical analysis of capitalism;
4. the theory of a party of a special type and the revolutionary movement associated with the party, developed by Lenin; such a theory was absent in orthodox Marxism
5. scientific communism - the doctrine of the inevitable establishment of a new social system; while the construction of communism was declared a matter of the next decades, it was moved to the "historically foreseeable period".

Originally, the socialist society was conceptually equal to the communist society; however, in defining the differences between Socialism and Communism, Lenin explained their similarity to Marx's conceptual descriptions of the lower-stage and the upper-stage of a communist society. That, immediately after a proletarian revolution, in lower-stage communism, the structure of a society must be based upon the labour contributed by individual men and women; whereas, in upper-stage communism, the structure of society would be: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

The goal of Marxist–Leninist political economy is the emancipation of men and women from the dehumanisation caused by mechanistic work that is psychologically alienating; people are thus freed from having to perform alienating labour for financial access to the material necessities of life.

Marxism–Leninism supports universal social welfare. Improvements in public health and education, provision of child care, provision of state-directed social services, and provision of social benefits are deemed by Marxist–Leninists to help to raise labour productivity and advance a society in development towards a communist society. This is part of Marxist–Leninists' advocacy of promoting and reinforcing the operation of a planned socialist economy. It advocates universal education, with a focus on developing the proletariat with knowledge, class consciousness, and understanding the historical development of communism.

Marxist–Leninist policy on family law has typically involved: the elimination of the political power of the bourgeoisie, the abolition of private property, and an education that teaches citizens to abide by a disciplined and self-fulfilling lifestyle dictated by the social norms of communism as a means to establish a new social order.

The Marxist–Leninist world view is atheist, wherein all human activities are the result of human volition and not the actions of supernatural beings (gods and goddesses) who have direct agency in the public and private affairs of human society. The Soviet physicist Vitaly Ginzburg said that the "Bolshevik communists were not merely atheists, but, according to Lenin's terminology, militant atheists" in excluding religion from the social mainstream, from education, and from government.