WHEN Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development chief executive Peter Cheese said, reacting to news that top bosses earn on average 117 times more than their employees, that this pay gap was “still unacceptably wide and undermines public trust in business,” we can see where he is coming from.

But with the greatest of respect for Cheese, this misses the point. The fact that, by the measures deployed by his association, “executive pay” for the average FTSE 100 top bosses fell by 13 per cent last year is also by the by.

The real issue is not the size of the pay gap but the nature of the relationship top bosses enjoy with the means of production, with the way in which profits are generated and pay fixed for both those elevated above us and we the common people.

We can easily chart a desirable route out of this situation in which some people have much more in the way of income than they can reasonably spend and others have barely enough money to spend on the things they really need.

The first step is to imagine a situation where, as Karl Marx suggested: “In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

Lest anyone hasten to point out we are long way from this eminently desirable state of affairs, it might be useful to point out an intermediate stage might be traversed in which society might expect each individual to contribute as best they can and receive in return a portion of our collectively created wealth in the form of a sufficiency measured out by the work contributed.

Even this relative paradise is barely imaginable in today’s world. Under the austerity regime bestowed upon us by the bourgeois parties of successive governments, the absolute number of people unable even to obtain the bare minimum to cover the costs of reproducing their labour power is steadily increasing.

As minimum pay cannot meet the basic costs of maintaining a home, heating, food and clothing for the average household, many people find their way to foodbanks in which charity makes up the shortfall that capitalism cannot or will not.

Charity is the inevitable accompaniment to the cruel realties of Marx’s system of “bourgeois right” and we should not decry the powerfully progressive impulses which see millions of people contributing to foodbanks.

Whether this is driven by solidarity — as with the Young Communists’ successful foodbank summer campaign — or by religious conviction, for as the Acts of Apostles (Acts 4:32–35) tells us, goods were held in common and “distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” such acts reveal the systematic injustice of our present-day world.

These human impulses stands in contradiction to capitalism.

But charity is never enough and the first step on the road to resolve the urgent material and moral problems which Cheese has highlighted with his hardly surprising but useful report is for us to collectively embark on a powerful campaign for higher wages.