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.
You can reject it all you want, but to those who claim they are socialists, there is a difference. That is why Hitler and his National Socialists were at war with Stalin and his Communists.
The socialists claim they do not own the means of production but that they take a large portion of the profits in order to maintain a very large government that provides the necessities to the people and in order to help ‘redistribute’ those profits for the sake of egalitarianism (equality of outcome). The socialists still allow private property and ownership of companies. They rule employers through regulation, not by outright confiscation.
The communists are bold in proclaiming that they own everything outright and they do not allow private property or the accumulation of wealth.
My point was, and I repeat, that the two have as their ultimate goal (whether the socialists will admit it or able to see far enough down that road or can review history honestly enough) Statist totalitarianism.
Socialism is a path toward total state control because eventually the government does run out of money to take from the produces and eventually the producers give up after being robbed enough and the socialist state does not have the funds it needs. So it either reverts back to varying degrees of privatization (free market), or it simply takes over everything and the socialists become communists.
You and I can argue that there is no real difference, and I’d agree with that, but if you try to argue with socialists about why their ideology will ultimately fail and will result in a change of direction (thus my crossroads analogy) you will lose if you do not define the difference between socialism and communism as they differentiate between the two.