The people of the village work together to make sure that everyone has clean water and housing, healthcare, education, a vibrant cultural life, and a space for debating and determining what the village needs and how best to provide it - in other words, a space for democracy.

Near the literal space assigned for democratic debate and deliberation at the centre of the village also lies a marketplace. So far so good. It feels like the marketplace might be another good place to gather, a place full of colour and chaos and life, a place of new things and needful things, a place that serves many of the needs of the people.

Imagine, though, if the marketplace kept growing in size, so much so that the people of the village slowly realised that the village was no more. The village square had been taken over by the marketplace. The provision of health, education, water, housing, and even the people's culture, had been taken over by the market. The entire village had become nothing more than a marketplace. There was no longer a village, no longer a community, only a market.

When we talk about democratising the economy, we mean reclaiming the village, rebuilding the democratic space that should exist and thrive at the centre of the village, and returning the village to the ownership and control of the people who live and work there. It does not mean eradicating the marketplace. It means insisting, though, that the marketplace is not everything.

When the big corporate players in that marketplace talk about the economy, they usually mean profits. They don't mean workers. Hence, for example, the fantasy of a jobless recovery, or a recovery that is structured around wage suppression and accelerated job insecurity, including the expansion of the gig economy. This at a time when, for example, five food-delivery riders have been killed in the last two months.

The economy is more than profits. It is us, our deeply personal struggles, our everyday lives, our ability to look after each other and those we love. Democratising the economy means collectively determining the future of our nation. It means self-determination in the realm of work and in the realm of life beyond work. Democratising the economy means making not only workplaces safe, but also making society safe by ensuring prosperity is shared instead of hoarded.

Democratising the economy means exercising our voice in the key decisions about how and what we need to make as a society, and how this should be shared. It means, for example, having a voice on the critical question of how we respond to the climate crisis.

It means ensuring no one misses out on the essentials of life.

The pandemic has shown us how public institutions are so central to our survival, from the public health system to the social security system, from public education to public housing. The pandemic has taught all of us that it is the workers who are essential. And it has also brought to the fore how vital the union movement is in protecting workers, not only in the workplace, but in the economy and in the community.

From the economic vandalism of Chris Corrigan trying to dismantle the unionised workforce at Patrick Stevedores in 1998 to Alan Joyce sacking thousands of Qantas workers this year while happily taking public money and personally taking home a salary that beggars belief, working people are faced with a fundamental problem - the problem of not having control over the decisions that the likes of Corrigan and Joyce and the cliques of extremely well-remunerated company board directors are free to make, with no thought for their impact on our lives.

They are exercising their recognised power over huge masses of capital, mostly concentrated in the hands of very few people across not only the country but the globe. And they help shape the laws by which they are able to do this. In the words attributed to former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, "We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."

In our democracy, we value the principle of one person, one vote. We would be outraged if, for example, the richer you were the more votes you had, or if sections of our society were not allowed to vote. But let's think about democracy more broadly. Every day, not just on election days, wealthy individuals and powerful corporations exercise what they see as their "right" to all the votes over what happens in the economy. Many of these corporations are global, owned and controlled by individuals completely cut off from our society, paying no taxes and paying no heed to what happens in our lives or to our environment. And every day we are taught to accept that this is not only normal but natural.

We are taught that the biggest owners and controllers of global capital are best placed and best qualified to make the decisions on what we will produce, how we will produce it, where we will produce it, how we will be compensated as workers and what we, through our government, will need to provide. Imagine if these questions were determined by a broader constituency. Imagine if they were also determined by the workers who do both the producing and the bulk of the consuming.

But over the past 40 years the purveyors of neoliberalism have attempted to subject nearly every corner of our lives to the rule of the market. Global corporates exercise a deeply undemocratic influence over domestic governments, making life harder for workers through a deliberate agenda of insecure work, lower corporate taxes, privatisation and cuts to social spending. Nothing is exempt from the urge to turn everything into a commodity for sale, from drinking water to education and health.

Even in the midst of a pandemic, people matter less as massive profits matter more.

We all want to feel that we are useful, but we do not want to feel we're being used. This is the constant struggle within the world of work. It can only be resolved through greater democratic control over the ways we work. The achievement of full employment, the elimination of insecure work, the expansion of the public sector, investment in social infrastructure such as health, aged care, social services, income support, education and housing, industry planning with particular focus on the regions and areas with a high concentration of unemployment and underemployment - all of these measures are concrete and achievable steps in the direction of a more democratic economy, especially when they prioritise community and worker participation in decision-making.

The movement towards a more democratic economy is already happening, albeit by small steps. In their excellent report, Reclaiming Public Services: How cities and citizens are turning back privatisation, Satoko Kishimoto and Olivier Petitjean have compiled a collection of cases from amongst 835 recent examples of (re)municipalisation of public services across the globe, which have "generally succeeded in bringing down costs and tariffs, improving conditions for workers and boosting service quality, while ensuring greater transparency and accountability".

As they explain in their introduction:

"Sometimes it may feel as though we are living in a time when profit and austerity are our only horizons. In reality, below the radar, thousands of politicians, public officials, workers and unions, and social movements are working to reclaim or create effective public services that address the basic needs of people and respond to our social, environmental and climate challenges. They do this most often at the local level."

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There is considerable scope for further development of the democratisation of the economy, not only through direct public ownership and control but through models such as worker co-operatives, workers' capital, community wealth-building, and worker representation on boards. Strong arguments have also been made for a public stake in companies that require government bailouts, as well as attaching conditions around workforce and unionisation in both government procurement and cases of industry assistance.

The art of politics is to create forces to do in the future what we cannot do today, as Chilean sociologist Marta Harnecker explained. Despite the obvious opposition to the trajectory of economic democracy, our hope is concrete, collective and far more realistic than the attitude of surrender to the marketisation of everything. Our job is to reframe what is understood in our time and place to be "common sense" so that it reflects not corporate desires but our common desires. The task is huge but it is urgent.

As political theorist Wendy Brown has recently reflected:

"I join others in insisting that hope is not something you have but something you create ... [W]ill significant structural change in our political economy come before the planet burns up and before economic desperation turns more and more people hard, mean and vigilante-ish? I don't know. I do know that it's an ethical-political imperative to do all we can to make that change happen."