All socialists are feminists. Full stop.

I can see the logic at play with sentiments like this one. The need to function, as socialists, from within to make the arguments for emancipation and working class power.

Since you invoked Lenin, let me quote Lenin on a similar vein:

"...the need for a determined struggle against attempts to give a communist colouring to bourgeois-democratic liberation trends ... the Communist International must enter into temporary (my emphasis) alliance with bourgeois democracy ... but should not merge with it, and should under all circumstances uphold the independence of the proletarian movement even if it is in its most embryonic form."

In this address, Lenin was discussing national liberation movements. But I feel it is of equal importance with regard to Feminism.

As a Marxists it should be at the very front of our minds, that from its core to its logical conclusions, Feminism is not proletarian - it is no more proletarian than Social Democracy. In fact, it is clearly petty-bourgeois, both in theory and in its practices. There is a strong and marked difference both historically and in our modern age between proletarian and socialist women, their struggles and their politics, and those of the feminists.

I recently shared on this subreddit a lengthy analysis of identity politics, which since the 60s have become central to feminist politics. The analysis showed fundamentally how these politics cripple the capacity for strong, cohesive, movements and render the interests of the oppressed to little more than a personal matter.

The concept that feminism opposes sexism is purely ideological. In action, it is far more likely to betray the fight against sexism with its petty-bourgeois politics and appeals to the ruling class. This is not a new feature of feminism. This has been present in feminism since its conception - a conception, I will add, which was had in the circles of academics and petty-bourgeois women, whose demands were profoundly different to the demands of working and socialist women.

Marxists are, by their very definition, not feminists. Our political practice, our theory, is that of proletarian revolution. That is the centrepiece from which all of our analyses are based. And for us the single most important fact is that it is the class struggle, and the class antagonisms, which undo the ideological divisions imposed upon the working class. The fight against sexism is not a separate question to the Marxist. The fight against sexism is necessarily woven into workers' struggles. And while there may be resistance, it falls to political leaders to argue against those ideological divisions - an effort which we not only know is possible from experience, but profoundly powerful.

By asserting that Marxists are feminists, you throw Marxism under the bus, and with it the whole theory of working class emancipation. You subjugate the substance of our theory and practice to opportunism and popularism, and to the identity politics of the feminist movement, with all of its small liberal, middle-class, modus operandi.

Now to be clear, I wholeheartedly agree with the position of working with feminists. It is necessary to cooperate with varying political groups to build movements. But we must, as Marxists, know where the line has to be drawn. We must maintain clarity of theory and practice - a clarity impossible when we dilute that theory and practice in the murky waters of identity politics by saying "we are feminists." We should use this mode of cooperation as a way to instil principally class analysis, to subjugate, if not entirely dismiss, identity politics and patriarchy theory to it. We ought to show that class struggle is the only way to liberate women from sexism. We ought to seek to segregate feminists - by which I mean to thoroughly separate the working class feminists from the bourgeois feminists, to unveil the class distinctions which are integral to understanding how to combat oppression which feminist politics so artfully obscures.

We must make the argument and make it clearly that the only way to end the oppression of sexism, and the gender roles imposed by capitalism, is to abolish the material conditions of capitalism and class society. Conditions which are the single cause of exploitation and oppression. And we must show why feminism is not the adequate in that effort. We must also show that it is not feminist politics that have served as the driving force for change in the world, but working class politics. We must show that without a strong and militant working class movement, any concessional victories (such as fair work for fair pay) are impossible.