Justificare ideologică și discurs ficțional în economia planificată centralizat
Ideological justification and fictional discourse in the centrally planned economy

Summary/Abstract: Over the history, the prevailing view of society has been that social phenomena, in general, and economic phenomena, in particular, are the result of a conscious, deliberate project designed and implemented to improve the material condition of the common people. This view has its origins in Plato's political philosophy and dominated the humanities until the second half of the 18th century. After a relative decline for a century, the idea of central planning became popular again in the early 20th century, amid the rise of the socialist movement in Europe, as the only acceptable method of truly improving the human condition and eliminating the excesses of the capitalist system in the Western world. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that, despite its claims, the centralized economic planning has proven to be a failure, both theoretically and practically, its supposed benefits being the fruit of propaganda and fictional discourse used by governments in communist countries, especially those in the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union. The role of mere rhetoric was to save the chimera of centralized planning, to show the alleged superiority of the socialist system over the capitalist one.

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