“It Marx’s idea that what a person thinks depends on his income and class membership.”
Here is another one of Marx’s ideas.
Now just what do you suppose he means by this statement???
“the centralization of wealth in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with an exclusive monopoly” - Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto
As far as I recall, this is one of the conditions that Marx puts forth as necessary for the destruction of capitalism. I've seen it often quoted on numerous web sites which, like you, don't explain what they read into it. THey seem to find it very damning somehow: "Well, we have a central bank, don't we --- just like Marx wanted."
Merely having the central bank is different from the sentence you quoted. Please look at it again: "the centralization of wealth..."
There is no wealth in our central bank (the Fed). Do you know, in particular, that, at least since 1940s, the Fed has returned 97% of its profits to the U.S. Treasury? This fact is somehow "overlooked" by conspiracy theorists.
Next, what does centralization mean? A great proportion of the nation's wealth being at some "center" --- the central bank, as Marx alleges. So, do we see it? Of course not: Marx was totally wrong --- and fraudulent, as historians subsequently revealed -- so many times that it is unsurprising to see him wrong in this case.
Our national wealth is estimated at about 52 trillion dollars. For it to be "centralized" anywhere, that center has to contain a huge proportion of that --- 30, 40, 50 trillion. Just think about that: $40,000 billion must be concentrated in one place! Largest American companies have value of about only $200 billion --- and they are owned not by one person but by tens of millions of Americans. For example: BP, which was so much in the news during the spill in the Gulf, is owned by 39 million of Americans. There is no concerntration --- anywhere, let alone at the Fed.
This statement of Marx and Engels is just one of their idiotic prophecies. Recall that Marx also predicted that "workers" will be increasingly "impoverished" by capitalism. They were getting better and better off even as he wrote those words! (He actually falsified data in his Das Kapital to "prove" his point). That prediction, too, became completely laughable a few decades later: it was socialist workers in the Soviet Union and China that were impoverished, while American workers were busily buying houses and cars.
This "concentration of wealth at the central bank" is just one of those bogus "predictions," by Marx, at which we can only laugh today.