Before I attempt to answer your question, let's lay out the relevant portion of the argument made in the Jacobin article.

The author argues that the German Democratic Republic began life with an "impossible task": "How to build socialism in a country devastated by six years of war and twelve years of fascist terror, divided in half by the occupying powers, and now subject to crippling reparations payments?" The leadership of the GDR enjoyed an effective guarantee from the Soviet occupier. But during the 1950s, as the prosperity gap between West Germany and East Germany expanded, millions of East German citizens availed themselves of the option to flee west - a drain of manpower and brainpower that the GDR could ill afford. The Berlin Wall was the GDR's answer to this problem: "How to stabilize and consolidate the new socialist order while losing hundreds of thousands of able-bodied workers every year?"

The Wall was, according to the author, "ugly, menacing, and, for many citizens, no doubt heartbreaking." It also failed to reverse the long-term unsustainability of the East German system, which "struggled to remain competitive on the global market, outpaced by the wealthier and more advanced West" and was ultimately unable, in spite of the "extensive social benefits" it offered, to present a persuasive alternative to Western market capitalism. "By the time things came to a head in 1989, most East German workers had ceased to identify with the regime entirely." But the author argues that we cannot reduce East German history to the worst aspects of the Berlin Wall and to its ultimate failure: The Berlin Wall, and the broader system of which it was an integral part, gave the GDR a lease on life, allowing them to "build a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders. Workers were guaranteed employment, housing, and all-day childcare, while basic foodstuffs and other goods were heavily subsidized."

Let's separate out - and separately address - two major aspects of the article's description of East Germany: First, that East Germany did enjoy "a society that was broadly characterized by modest prosperity and social equality between classes and genders." Second, that the Berlin Wall was responsible for the economic and geopolitical stability required to achieve that modest prosperity and equality.

East Germany lasted only forty years as an independent state. In isolation, that fact doesn't tell us much. The German Empire lasted only 47 years. The Weimar Republic only 14; the Third Reich only twelve. Longevity is, after all, a quality that must be understood in economic, geopolitical, and social contexts. If we see the GDR as a "Russian satrapy" (per historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler), a child of the Cold War, cursed by the artificiality of its own existence and the inefficiency and repression of its politics, we might wonder, as historian Peter Grieder has, "why did the GDR last so long?"

One potential answer is that East German society really did offer something of substance to its people, who led entire lives of rich experience and accomplishment in a way that histories of repression and totalitarianism fail to recognize. Exclusively negative views of the GDR system were thick on the ground after reunification in the 1990s, but subsequent historical reevaluation has made this "kinder" thesis common, if not uncontroversial. Probably its most famous proponent is historian Mary Fulbrook, whose book The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker is an instructive example. (Her dominance is reflected in the fact that her students - and other historians advancing similar theses - are sometimes referred to as "Fulbrookians," and her variety of GDR social history as "the Fulbrookian school.") Fulbrook disputes "totalitarian" narratives of East German history, arguing that the GDR could better be understood as a "participatory dictatorship" in which average people really did have means and methods of political and social participation and in which social progress toward equality, however incomplete and compromised, really was made. Fulbrook uses the word "normalization" to describe the complex manner in which East Germans learned to live - and even thrive - within the physical and ideological confines of their system. And she reminds us pointedly that other, non-communist systems had physical and ideological confines of their own. Similarly, the so-called Alltagshistoriker ("historians of everyday life") have recognized that grand narratives of geopolitics and state policy are insufficient, and we require ethnographies and histories of the "mundane" in East German life - a recognition that not every East German was a Stasi informant or political dissident living out a plotline from dramas like The Lives of Others, Deutschland 83, or The Same Sky. Consider also historian Konrad Jarausch's "welfare dictatorship" concept, which argues that the GDR purchased popular complicity and acquiescence to totalitarianism with a baseline of social security, publicly-funded benefits, and publicly-subsidized "consumer socialist" prosperity. Historian Hester Vaizey's interviews with former GDR citizens reveal a diversity of attitudes toward the erstwhile Volksrepublik, including a degree of satisfaction and approval which is too reasoned and too complex to be written off as mere "nostalgia for East Germany" (the much-vaunted Ostalgie).

Again, this perspective is controversial in the historiography. However it is framed or understood, though, it is undeniable that the GDR did achieve that baseline of prosperity, whatever purposes or compromises are revealed when you pull up the economic rug to see what's underneath. Within the "New Economic System" reforms of the 1960s and the "Actually Existing Socialism" (real existierender Sozialismus) of the 1970s and 1980s, East Germany developed a consumer economy of no mean size or merit. Service literally from cradle to grave: conception, crèches, schooling, university, employment, housing, vacations, pensions, health insurance, and life insurance were all publicly provisioned or subsidized. If there was no excess or diversity of consumer goods, there was also no famine. If there was widespread decay or disuse of urban housing stock, there was virtually no homelessness. And if there was no job market to speak of, there was also no unemployment. Ownership of durable consumer goods like cars, televisions, and refrigerators grew, though it lagged far behind Western standards. (The nature of that growth is sometimes uneven and difficult to understand. Consider that in 1990, there were approximately 300 cars per 1,000 GDR citizens, but only about 110 telephones.) The cost in debt, fraud, and environmental damage that accompanied this baseline of modest prosperity would, of course, only become fully apparent after reunification.

(Continued in a comment below.)