All of this raises the question of what socialist countries can do in the future to prevent reactionary propaganda from taking hold.
Have bananas. Seriously the more productive system will win in the end. The ecological question makes a steady rise in consumerism unfeasable and undisirable. A more productive society might give more spare time instead of treats and save the enviroment. However people in the east had less treats just as much work and were horrible to the enviroment as well. Stuff like inequality don’t mean anything. A west German worker might have a Volkswagen, his boss a BMW and his boss a Porsche, all of those are much better than a Trabant so people accepted it. Unemployment existed in the west for a few, the average worker would never assume to be one of the unemployed. The West saw massive immigation to help with worker shortages even. Capitalism is full of contradictions. If your socialism isn’t more productive than that, there is something wrong with it.
Had the GDR given everyone the equivalent of a Volkswagen (as an example) I believe they would have succeeded, but a Trabant you wait a decade for? And the Volkswagen was not for “some”. Very few German workers would not be able to afford one. You have to look at the standard of average people to learn something about the viability of a society. A socialist society should avoid big differences I agree, but not be overall worse materially than capitalism (this includes spare time which capitalism hardly provides). And the people in eastern Germany were not happy about having cars at all, because they could see and often had family in the west living a much better life. Just because the covid response of my country could be worse I’m still jelous of China because they show very clearly that it could be much better.
For western workers “real socialism” looked poor and restrictive and utterly unapealing.