I’m accepting their terms.
I have always argued that Socialism can never be and was never intended to be its own economic system.
It is a crossroads.
On the path from free-market economies to central planning, you reach the crossroads of Socialism. It is at that point that the free market has been demonized enough to be unpopular and the amount of socialism that has been enacted has already proven itself to be an economic failure and a limiter of civil rights.
At the crossroads of Socialism, a country must either turn left to Communism, or right toward privatization, which eventually heads back to free markets.
I’m not sure those are their terms. I’ve always understood socialism to mean ownership of the means of production by the central government. All finer distinctions and lesser versions and how, exactly, leftist anarchism and communism differ from it, well, after a while it starts sounding like arguing over how many angels fit on the head of a pin.
Your assertion that socialism is communism only less so or communism is socalism only moreso I reject. Socialism is the government owning Everything. Communism is one variety of socialism, and it is the dictatorship of the proletariat before a withering away of the state.