the meme would only be accurate if what Hegel was doing was saying "imagine some sort of metal thing that makes other metal things go fast" and then Marx and Engels made a gun.
Seriously Hegels contribution to marxism is hugely overstated, almost everything he wrote on philosophy was nonsense and everything he wrote on natural philosophy was wrong, he only really contributed idealist dialectics and that was so under-cooked that Marx and Engels spent a whole book making the idea good, while dunking on him and similar idealist.
Hegel's relation to Marxism is that Marx and Engels were big Hegel nerds (the Young Hegelians) before they got cool and they decided to incorporate a small piece of Hegel's thinking (the dialectic) while flipping all the rest on its head.
So it's useful to know Hegel so you know the lineage of thought but important to know that Marx used Hegelian thought as a critical target more than anything.
Franz Mehring in his biography of Marx wrote this pretty openly, even coming very close to straight up writing "Marx and Engels were big Hegel nerds (the Young Hegelians) before they got cool"
How come Engels has evolved into a crab, but Marx hasn't?
Because Marx evolved into a platypus. Deeply unserious question.
