ceteris, I don’t know “whose books” you are referring to. I have both studied and taught Hegel. His Phenomenology of Mind is one of the most important books ever written. It describes the way in which new ideas destroy the old ones. Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, on which I did my Ph.D. thesis, is quite similar. Hegel’s antithesis and Kuhn’s anomalies are basically the same concept. Every theory is ultimately overcome by the aspects that do not work. This is the essence of progress, scientific and otherwise.
Hegel is not a proto-Marxist, any more than Kant is a proto-Hegelian, or Hume a proto-Kantian. The history of philosophy is the history of the articulation of great ideas, ideas which everyone already has, but cannot speak, as Hegel pointed out. Marx was the first to articulate the idea of technological progress, and that societies will change to adapt to new technologies. He was profoundly correct in that regard, his political philosophy aside.