system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can Hegel be understood without having read Kant?

So, brief rundown:
I'm studying Marxism a bit and I want to read *The Phenomenology of Spirit* as an accompanying piece of literature. This said, Hegel is the Dark Souls of philosophy. I've heard that understanding Hegel helps if you understand Kant, but for me that's a problem. 

I've admittedly never read Kant but nothing I know of his philosophy (or ~~racism~~ anthropology) particularly excites me. In fact I profoundly disagree with a lot of it. So, going back to the question - Just how understandable is Hegel sans Kant?
gpt
You're going to have a bad time.  It's probably worth at least reading the Prolegomena  to get a handle on Kant's metaphysics and epistemology.  As a bonus, it'll make almost everything written after Kant (at least in philosophy proper) easier.

Edit: to elaborate, at least part of what Hegel's reacting against is the the thing-in-itself (the unknowable thing that grounds the experience of an object) and Kant's categories.

Edit 2: You could probably read Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of History without Kant which would probably be immediately more helpful for Marx and an easier introduction to Hegel.  That's where I'd started with him.