You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.
That is not a stance Chomsky holds nor the vast majority of socialist. How have you become so anti-socialist without even knowing what socialism is?
Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.
Here's a glimpse at how our ruling class views the role of prison in our society:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman
I'm sure you witnessed and were subjected to terrible things. I would be careful though of concluding the problem was with "socialism" rather than powerful people abusing their power to maintain and amass more power. That dynamic is pretty universal and happens under any system with psychopaths in charge. Whenever it happens under one "-ism" people from other "-isms" will use that to point out how flawed the opposing ideology is. But really, all the system determines is how hard of a time the psychopath-in-charge has pulling the levers of power. We just put a psychopath in charge of our Democracy here in America 4 years ago, and his term ended with him instigating an insurrection on the country's Capitol in an attempt to maintain power, bringing an end to 240+ years of peaceful power transitions. It can happen anywhere.
TLDR; the American ruling class will pretextually raid your home and throw you in prison if you opposed their agenda of invading foreign countries and segregating the population by race. Not only will they put you to work and not pay you anything, they will actually charge you for the privilege of imprisoning you (again, for pretextual reasons), making a profit off of your misery. I guess we can conclude this is Democracy?
Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?
Yeah, read up on the way secret police worked in ex-communist countries and come back.
> Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?
My own experiences. Have you ever lived under a totalitarian socialist regime? Have you had to suffer for ideological persecution?