This is a study which aims to qualify and revise the traditional emphasis placed on the Social Democratic heartland of 'Red Vienna'. It focuses on workplace, community and political activity in the 'red', industrial enclaves scattered throughout the deeply conservative countryside of the Austrian provinces. It shows how a deepening divide between the priorities of Viennese and provincial Social Democracy weakened and undermined the movement as a whole in the period between the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire and the crushing of democratic politics in the Civil War of 1934. It is a important publication in European history. Austrian Social Democracy has long been widely recognised as a crucial example of the failure of the Left in the interwar years. This, though, is the first full-scale study of the Social Democratic movement which locates the reasons for that failure outside Vienna.