A short biography of Jacobo Prince, an important anarchist communist militant in Argentina.
Yacoub Prinzman was born into a Jewish family in the Gruskoi area of Ukraine, in the Kherson region, on January 14th, 1901. He emigrated with his family to Argentina in 1909, settling in La Plata. He completed his primary and secondary studies, although this was interrupted in the third year after he was expelled for talking back to a teacher.
He began to read Yiddish anarchist writings from the age of fifteen, in particular those of David Edelstadt and Morris Winchevsky. Now operating under the name of Jacobo Prince, he joined the group around the anarchist magazine Ideas, published in La Plata. This group was animated in particular by Fernando del Intento. He soon became a very gifted speaker.
On May Day 1922 he delivered an inspiring speech at the town of General Pico in the state of La Pampa. This so impressed the local anarchists that they asked him to stay to help build the movement there. Mid-1923 he started editing the anarchist paper La Pampa Libre, also acting as its typographer. Unfortunately, there were very serious, and indeed, murderous, divisions within the anarchist movement in Argentina at that time. La Pampa Libre had been originally close to the FORA, but this changed with Prince becoming an editor. The paper aimed itself at rural workers and questions about the land became its principal obsessions. It increasingly identified with the politics of La Antorcha newspaper, published in Buenos Aires, and opposed to that of the politics of La Protesta newspaper. This “Antorchista” current advocated direct action as a means of struggle, sometimes defended the Argentinean expropriators, and was opposed to the La Protesta group around Diego Abad de Santillan and Emilio Lopez Arango.
This led to violent clashes between the two tendencies. The worst was the attack on the premises of La Pampa Libre on August 14th, 1924, by a group of FORA activists. In the resulting shootout, one FORA activist, Domingo de Mayo, was killed whilst Jacobo Prince was shot in the spine. As a result, he was hospitalised for several years and operated on several times. He remained almost paralysed on the right side and, after a very long convalescence and through sheer willpower, managed to recover some mobility. Coming out of hospital, he started work with the Ideas magazine in solidarity campaigns for Sacco and Vanzetti and for Simon Radowitzky.
After General Uriburu carried out a coup in September 1930, Prince continued anarchist activity, despite the shutting down of Ideas by the regime. Hundreds of anarchists were imprisoned and during their incarceration decided to attempt a re-organisation of the movement. This led to the Rosario congress of September 1932, where previously opposed militants like Abad de Santillan, Gaston Leval, Jacobo Prince, Juan Coloma, etc., came together to defend organisational theses and created the Regional Committee of Anarchist Relations (CRRA).
“Paradoxically, the repression served to bring reflection within the anarchist movement, and the dictatorship provided the concrete framework for generating unity: the 3rd bis cadre of the Villa Devoto prison, where hundreds of militants of different tendencies had converged, many as a previous step to their transfer to Ushuaia (the Argentine Siberia). After several disputes, the libertarian militants managed to evict the Communist prisoners from the wing, a situation that must have contributed to the recognition and cohesion of their identity, to unite in this secondary battle, but which was not minor for anarchist thought.
From then on, 300 militants of all tendencies, in September 1931, organised a Congress in the prison. It was the beginning of unity and reconstruction, but at the same time the birth of a new topic of discussion: the creation of a “specific” organisation of anarchism, which would manage to coordinate and unify its forces. “Specificism” was not really a new topic; the idea of building a “mother” organization had always been around, and a Regional Congress held in 1922, which did not progress, could have started that path.
With three main points of discussion: overcoming the fratricidal differences of the previous decade, creating a “specific” anarchist organization, and revitalizing the FORA without neglecting other forms of union participation, it was decided at the prison congress to promote a large meeting in September 1932 in Rosario, the II Regional Anarchist Congress”.
The CRRA had as its voice the newspaper Accion Libertaria, from 1933 onwards, where Price provided most of the editorials and hundreds of articles. In the early 1930s he also collaborated with the magazine Nervio based in Buenos Aires and animated by Samuel Kaplan.
At the same time, Prince formed in La Plata the Comite de agitation por los presos de Bragado (Agitation Committee for the Bragado Prisoners) (see the biography of Ana Piacenza here at libcom for more details) for which he would organise many meetings and tours in the interior of the country and write numerous articles and manifestos until their release in 1945.
In October 1935 he was one of the key figures in the organisation of the congress held in La Plata where the Argentine Anarchist Communist Federation (FACA) was formed, of which he was one of the leading lights.
He was one of the FACA delegates , along with Ana Piacenza, Jacobo Maguid, José Grunfeld, etc, who travelled to Spain with the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War. He probably collaborated on the magazine Documentos historicos de España published by the Servicio de Propaganda España of the FACA. Jacobo Prince was one of the Argentinean signatories on November 28, 1937, of a Manifesto of support for the CNT-FAI.
Returning to Argentina in 1939, he resumed his collaboration with many titles of the libertarian press, including Acción Libertaria , Hombres de America, and Solidaridad Obrera. He then contributed to the newspaper Reconstruir , where he provided a consistent and continuous critique of Peronism, starting with an article in the first issue of June 1946, El totalitarismo falsea el principio de justicia social.
In December 1951 he was one of the organisers of the 3rd and underground congress of the FACA where a declaration on the constructive values of libertarian socialism was adopted. In February 1955 at its 4th congress, the organisation changed its name to Argentine Libertarian Federation (FLA). After the overthrow of Peron in September 1955 by a conservative sector of the army, he was one of the main authors, along with Luis Danussi and Juan Corral ,of reports on the workers’ movement presented at the plenary assemblies of the FLA in March 1956 and December 1957. He was also one of the speakers at the Casa de los Libertarios, inaugurated on December 14, 1957, where, every week, for many years, numerous conferences were organized in which comrades of all nationalities participated, including Herbert Read, Edgard Leuenroth, and Eugen Relgis.
At the beginning of the 1960s, he was the FLA's secretary for international relations and participated in the 5th FLA congress of 1961 and then in the extraordinary congress of August 1963, where solidarity with the Cuban comrades fighting against the Castro dictatorship was reaffirmed. At the same time, he gave numerous conferences and provided Spanish translations for many other foreign authors.
Jacobo Prince died on October 21, 1978.
Nick Heath
Sources:
https://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article16092
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