I am also disheartened by Brad's comments - the more or less standard line about communism being just terrible, while we live in a relatively decent society/system (in need of reform, perhaps, maybe even serious reform, but not complete overhaul).
In both systems the powerful few exploit the majority of the population. For what its worth, I think the US and Europe are pretty decent places to live compared with the rest of the world. More politically free (by any measure) and materially well off (although this is due in large measure to historical reasons) than the former USSR and China under communism.
At the same time, western intervention in the third world was more brutal and more widespread than communist adventures, although this may have been due to the West's greater power and wealth as opposed to being more inherently "bad," or "evil," than its communist adversaries.
The world has never seen a free industrialized society, which in my mind is the proper standard for comparing systems, with anything approaching real democracy and equality. By this standard both the East and West look bad. And the outlook for the development of such a society in the near term is bleak. There simply aren't any popular progressive institutions which could be called upon to serve an egalitarian and democratic society, even if all of our current bad institutions were swept away in a revolution tonight at midnight.
Brett