He’s referring to the other definition of socialism, which is not state ownership of the means of production, but public/no ownership of means of production, i.e. “the workers own the factories”. He’s technically right, his brand of socialism wouldn’t be totalitarian nor would it necessarily have to be statist. It has a different flaw; it’s a pipe dream. They are completely forgetting that economic activity requires risk-taking and initiative, in short: organization. They are talking about “the factories” as if factories simply pop up in the countryside when it’s time for them to be built. Somebody has to organize that. In his society there wouldn’t be any factories. Socialists could take over existing factories, but there wouldn’t be any new ones. Thus in practice “true” socialism degenerates into central planning whenever attempted, because somebody has to organize things or people starve.