Pravidlá socialistického spolužitia ako špecifický nástroj socialistického práva (neukončená polemika civilistiky v ČSSR)

The significance of the program documents of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia for the creation, implementation and application of law was already recognized by earlier legal historians. However, it was not particularly emphasized that the rules of socialist coexistence were also a tool for the politicization of law. Already in the 1960s and 1970s, contemporaneous polemics were ongoing about their nature and significance – whether they are a source of law or not, whether they are identical to morality and good manners, or rather to the politics of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. At the same time, they were also understood as a guide for the rule-maker, and further within the adjudication also as an interpretive guide, as a tool for filling gaps in the law, or finally even as a tool for balancing and searching for proportionality. In the contribution, we come to the conclusion that these rules represented a special tool by which the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the relatively independent world of legal norms could control the creation of law, its application, and its everyday implementation – especially because at the time it was accepted that law does not consist only of legal norms, but also of legal relations and legal awareness, whereby it was possible to intervene effectively into these areas precisely by the rules of socialist coexistence. Thus, the rules of socialist coexistence could on one hand could lend the legal norms a greater degree of informality, but at the same time on the other hand they were to exert an educational effect on all citizens, aimed towards their adoption of extra-legal regulatory mechanisms of behaviour and action, which was supposed to lead to the ultimate goal of replacing law in the communist future.