He was the best of the ferment of writers around the CPGB (Third International, not the organisation that carries its name, now), many of whom contributed to the Left Review, such as Ralph Fox (The Novel and the People), A.L. Morton (People's History of England) F Klingender (who wrote probably the first ever book on white collar workers), as well as some who went on to achieve notoriety such as Anthony Blunt and present-day High Court judge Stephen Sedley (whose juvenile articles on Shakespeare and the people's theatre are in Left Review). Some outside of the III international contributed like anarchist Herbert Read, and even Max Eastman's Artists in Uniform was excerpted.
Caudwell's own work was wide ranging and even eclectic, and though it was very good, it was also quite unstructured. Most of all, though, he was ahead of his time: a full generation ahead of the school of Marxist Cultural Criticism that began with Raymond Williams carried on by Stuart Hall and Terry Eagleton and blossomed out into the post-structuralists like Ros Coward and Colin MacCabe. In many ways Cuadwell was better than those who came after, but they had the advantage that there was an established intellectual framework (ideology, bas and superstructure) to talk about these things, whereas Caudwell had to say it all for the first time. Eagleton talks a bit about Caudwell in his book Marxism and Literary Criticism, but not with much affection.
In the 1970s Caudwell's work was in print with Lawrence and Wishart, and was by default the first port of call for anyone interested in Marxism and art. I spied a copy of his Art and Illusion on the shelves of the fantastic poet Tony Harrison when he was being interviewed on the TV.
Lastly, Charles makes the argument that we are not the same people we were. This same argument was made by the reactionary Joseph Barker, defending slavery and himself against charges of inconsistency, as recorded by a contemporary, the Chartist Adams:
At one meeting, Barker was challenged from the audience, a letter in his name of some years earlier, against slavery was produced. Was he the Joseph Barker who had written it? ‘No,’ was the astonishing reply. ‘It is, as everybody knows, a physiological fact that the particles of the human frame are all changed in the course of every seven years. More than seven years have elapsed since that letter was written; therefore I am not the Joseph Barker who wrote it!’ W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, 1968, p 400