I am a Socialist, but that does not mean you are necessarily good.

Oscar Wilde said: " Socialism precludes the necessity for people to ‘spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism’.

"You know I am a socialist."

"Are you." (thinks - my goodness he must be an all round good chap, no need to prove it, by, you know - handing his money to the poor.

This fait acompli, as an all round good egg, that a socialist might present to one is more often than not done by those socialists intent on repressing their complicity with the system.

As to left leaning intellectuals they are often unhappy in their own (generally bourgeois) class – that they wish to secede from it and to enjoy an imaginary identification with simpler people, industrial or farm workers, underclasses, oppressed minorities, exotic populations in situations of cruel subjection or heroic revolt.

Why would they the socialists or left leaning intellectuals do this?

Becasue as Frederic Jameson points out, such identifications (with the common people) are very welcome to their mind-set, as they believe it enlarges their sympathies and undermine or dissolve the confines of their own class limits.