Karl Polanyi finished writing The Great Transformation in 1944. At that time, Europe was ablaze, and liberal capitalism was collapsing under its own contradictions. His diagnosis was devastating: a self-regulating market is not a natural phenomenon but a political construct, sustained by force and generating —almost with clockwork precision— its own social reaction. Eighty years later, that thesis is more unsettling than reassuring. Not because the world is the same as it was then, but because the differences are, in several ways, aggravating factors.

This special issue wasn’t created to celebrate an anniversary. It was created to answer more difficult questions: What does Polanyi tell us when the markets he analyzed have become planetary, digital, and financialized to the extreme? What does the double movement —that tension between market expansion and societal self-preservation— mean when society itself has become radically heterogeneous, fragmented, and increasingly difficult to name in the singular?

The collaborations that conform this issue of Ola Financiera come from different traditions and with concerns that do not always coincide. What unites them is a shared commitment: that The Great Transformation is not a 20th-century document about the 19th century, but an analytical tool that, when used effectively, raises urgent questions about the present.
The first article examines the relationship between deregulated markets, artificial intelligence, and the emergence of new forms of fascism. The thesis is unsettling but difficult to ignore: when optimization algorithms operate without institutional checks and balances, they reproduce and amplify the same logics of exclusion that Polanyi identified in the interwar period. AI does not appear here as a futuristic threat but as an accelerated extension of already known processes. Fascism is not the same as it was then either, but its conditions of possibility are more similar than is desirable. Alongside this work, another contribution raises the category of polyglobalization to name something that the concept of globalization alone can no longer adequately describe: the coexistence of multiple circuits of economic integration with their own logics, different speeds, and social effects that do not converge toward any equilibrium.

From the perspective of social theory, the next article engages Polanyi in dialogue with debates on complex society. The argument is not that Polanyi anticipated everything, that would not be doing him much of a favor. It is something more precise: that his refusal to separate economy and society offers a more fertile starting point than much of subsequent systems theory. Added to this is a reflection on the city and urban life that deserves further examination. If Polanyi's fictitious commodities —land, labor, money— have a stage where their artificiality becomes most visible, that stage is the contemporary city: urban land as an object of pure speculation, care work as an invisible externality, and mortgage credit as a mechanism that simultaneously includes and excludes, sometimes within the same contract.

Precisely another article in this issue deals with fictitious commodities, financialization, and crisis. The 2008 crisis was not a technical accident; it was the clearest expression of what happens when money loses all connection to real production. That the same mechanisms are operating on a larger scale fifteen years later is not a paradox. It is confirmation that without structural transformation, the cycle repeats itself.

Two articles expand on the double movement in directions that Polanyi himself did not explore. One does so from a feminist perspective: social self-protection has a gender. Women have historically sustained the reproductive networks that cushion the blows of the market, without this translating into proportional political power. To read the countermovement without this key is not only incomplete; it is politically naive. The other addresses the European Green Deal as an attempt —contradictory, negotiated, and fraught with inertia— to construct a collective response to ecological destruction. The question it leaves open is whether this pact represents a genuine countermovement or merely a more sophisticated way of managing the crisis without transforming it.

The issue concludes with an article on structural heterogeneity in Latin America that touches on something the Polanyian canon often ignores: the experience of societies that never fully embraced classical liberalism, societies that articulate forms of work and life that the market has not managed to homogenize and probably never will. Reading Polanyi from this perspective requires not only applying his categories but also questioning them, subjecting them to rigorous scrutiny.

Eighty years after The Great Transformation, there is no grand synthesis to offer. Nor is that what should be looked for. What there is —and what this issue attempts to show—is that the questions Polanyi posed remain more productive than many of the answers that have been given since. In social theory, that is no small feat.

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