The Duchin Formula

The formula was outlined in a 1991 speech by Ronald Duchin and taught corporations how to dismantle activist organizations. The strategy predates the speech and has been used by many corporate and government bodies including Stratfor, and it became widely known to activists through the Stratfor hack, the material released after Jeremy Hammond was coerced into targeting the company by the FBI posing as Anonymous. His activism resulted in a 10 year prison sentence. The instruction is three steps and an outcome. Isolate the radicals. Cultivate the idealists and educate them into becoming realists. Co-opt the realists into agreeing with industry. Duchin's own summary of the result is that if an industry brings about these relationships the credibility of the radicals is lost and the opportunists can be counted on to share in the final policy solution. Marsh's contribution is to re-read the taxonomy in her own terms, which collapses it from four categories to three. Radicals are the genuine activists. Opportunists are endo-ideals, created by their reflectors and reliably self-interested. Idealists and realists are one category, both reflectors, differing only in whether they currently reflect the radical idea or corporate and government power, which is exactly why the conversion the formula recommends is possible. She points to the strategies in daily use. Opportunists are promoted through advances, awards, positions and funding, and realists are co-opted through recognition rather than payment.

The formula circulated widely among activists after the 2012 Stratfor release and appears in research on corporate counter-campaigning alongside the Powell memorandum and a long history of public relations strategy against environmental and labour movements. Social movement scholarship covers the same dynamics under co-optation, channelling and the professionalization of advocacy. Astroturfing and SLAPP literature documents adjacent tactics. What Marsh adds is a structural reading, since translating the categories into endo-ideal and reflector roles turns a list of personality types an organizer must sort people into a description of positions people occupy and can be moved between.