Excerpt from Karl Marx, Capital, Volume
I, Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour Power.
“The owner of labour-power
is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the
continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of
labour-power must perpetuate himself, “in the way that every living individual
perpetuates himself, by procreation.” [8] The labour-power withdrawn from the market by
wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an
equal amount of fresh labour-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence
necessary for the production of labour-power must include the means necessary
for the labourer’s substitutes, i.e., his children, in order that this race of
peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance in the market. [9]
In order to modify the
human organism, so that it may acquire skill and handiness in a given branch of
industry, and become labour-power of a special kind, a special education or
training is requisite, and this, on its part, costs an equivalent in commodities of a greater or less amount. This amount varies
according to the more or less complicated character of the labour-power. The
expenses of this education (excessively small in the case of ordinary
labour-power), enter pro tanto into the total value spent in its production. “
Full text
available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/#n9