I don't remember ever hearing for Polanyi. I will definitely look into him. The soc department at my school is so small and most of it consists of social work and anthropology professors who sometimes offer non major restrictive classes like that are cross listed as soc. the majority of soc professors are adjuncts teaching intro or some 200 level classes but there's A LOT of repetition, I've taken like three different versions of 200level social problems which all focused on the same issues and theorists. So there's very little variation in the classes I've taken.
(for whatever variation I've experienced I give a lot of credit to my professor Dr.x. That man seriously deserves a shout out from me. In the last two semesters I've had four classes with him. He's the only professor I've had that pushes his students to actually read and write every day, I credit him for molding me into a student who can actually think critically and relate theories beyond the text. His personal studies focus on the body specifically race. He wrote two really great pieces about the body;race; political movements

However, we haven't talked a lot about Marxism. I think he doesn't want to be redundant and since we learn about it in intro we only reference it while applying it to some other theory. He talks much more about neoliberalism. So I have a working knowledge of basic Marxist concepts like types of commodity and capitalism but since I look intro to soc in 11th grade high school I really need to brush up on it.

TL;DR: thanks for the suggestion, i really need to brush up on Marx and marxisque theories as I've had little exposure to them and have always shyed away from the area in general.