Labour is examining ways to give workers a greater right to own shares in the companies where they work, according to John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor.

In a speech in Manchester, McDonnell will propose giving employees the right to request share ownership and have those proposals considered by their bosses. He will advocate offering workers the first right to buy out a company that is being dissolved, sold or floated on the stock exchange.

“The Tories have offered a right to buy. Labour would seek to better this. We’d be creating a new right to own,” he will say.

On Saturday, Labour’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, proposed barring companies from distributing dividends unless they paid the living wage and putting in place salary curbs to stop bosses being paid many times more than workers.

In an attempt to help workers have a greater say over their workplaces, McDonnell’s speech will make an argument in favour of more cooperative ownership as the old economic strategies “have run their course”.

He will say the state has achieved a lot, from the NHS to the welfare system, but there is a “long labour movement tradition of decentralisation and grass-roots organisation …

“There is a thread within the labour and radical movement of self-organisation, running right back even before the Chartists to those early organisers for democracy against old corruption.”

He will say deep “questions of ownership, control, and democracy” have been left to one side under previous Labour governments but the party must look at radical ways of “changing the rules of the game”.

“Our problem today is that we must learn to think systemically about the kind of economy we want,” he will say. “And where our opponents now warn and threaten about the terrors ahead, we must present a positive case for the future we all want.

“The Tories talked relentlessly, overwhelmingly about the future. Labour, strikingly, did not. We cannot allow that to happen again. We cannot be small ‘c’ conservatives. But the future we want will be built on the best of what we do now. We learn from the past.”

McDonnell’s speech on the economy comes before Labour begins a series of free public lectures and seminars aimed at provoking debate on economic policy.