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HOW THE WORKING CLASS OVERTHROWS A DEMOCRATIC RULING CLASS
Marx, Engels and Lenin stated that the working class would be forced to use violence in order to overthrow states of the German absolutist type - which relied for their hold over society on a standing army and a bureaucracy. In states like Britain, where the society was largely self-governing - i.e. the government merely formalised and administered decisions which the elements of the society had already worked out through their interaction - Marx, Engels and Lenin felt that a peaceful transition was possible.
It would be difficult to sustain the argument that the conditions for a peaceful transition in Britain are different now than they were when Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote. As much of the British army as can be spared from NATO duties are now occupied in Northern Ireland. They are fully engaged in dealing with 1 million people. There are 60 million people in Britain. Further, no British government since World War I has so much as contemplated using troops against workers - indeed it is now contentious whether Government could even use troops to act as blacklegs in strikes. Most current bourgeois politicians would argue that the gain from keeping production going would be lost by the working class's reaction against the troops which would certainly have a vigourous political expression.
As far as an increase in bureaucracy is concerned, it is important to understand the type of bureaucracy that Marx, Engels and Lenin meant when they wrote. This was a system of government which regulated the society by laws and rules coming from the top rather than from the society around them. The system was inflexible because its basis was the government assessing the needs of society and promulgating them through law rather than the elements of society themselves developing those needs into ways and forms of meeting them and having the Government then simply affirm that those ways and forms were legitimate and furnishing if necessary the apparatus to administer them.
The best way of illustrating the difference is by comparing the development of collective bargaining in Britain and France. In Britain by the l860s both employers and unions had recognised the sense in negotiating wage contracts by industry and by region. (Sometimes as in textiles, the region and the industry were coterminous. Where they were not, as in mining and iron, the negotiating bodies reflected a regionalisation of the market for the commodity itself. E.g. Durham, and Northumberland as producers of coal for the export market shrank for a long time from negotiating with their fellow miners in the Midlands/Lancs/Yorks 'federated' area where coal was produced for the home market.) They therefore proceeded to construct 'conciliation boards' which in fact negotiated the conditions of work for the labour force and also dealt with any local disputes arising out of the agreement. In 1896 the Government Bill establishing a Government conciliation service provided that Government arbitration should only be used if both sides asked for it and the non-binding conciliation service only after one side had requested it.
The most progressive employers (such as David Dale, the Newcastle Quaker who was an ironmaster and on the board of the NE Railway) and the trade unions had shown that collective bargaining and 'conciliation boards' were effective institutions for ensuring that the production process flowed smoothly and for safeguarding the needs of both the working class and the employers within capitalism. The Government acknowledged this utility by providing similar services for industries incapable of developing them themselves (Trade Boards Act, 1907) and augmented the already existing institutions with its own. In France, the Government imposed a minimum wage structure and enforced collective bargaining on both employers and workers. The result was that both the employers and unions became dependent on the state to mete out the conditions of work and wage contracts. There was in fact no collective bargaining but rather regulation by law. The trade unions were weak compared to Britain. Though the conditions in the engineering industry were the same in France, no institution comparable to the shop steward ever developed out of the working class. Shop stewards in Britain were the working class representative in direct shop floor negotiation first with the engineering employer and later with the Government dilution commissioner in World War I about both wages and the organisation of production. In France, such questions were settled by the state.