To say that theory and practice are two different things is not to say that you can have one ENTIRELY without the other. They are two clearly different aspects of life and I think it is a mystification to try to conflate them, but nevertheless they are both operable at all times. What tends to create confusion about this topic are: 1. The fact that you have a binary here. The third term is missing: critique, which is the activity into which theory and practice are continually being combined and recombined without reaching any terminal state. This process is what you might call Bildung or experience and what develops out of it is critique that is made up of theoretical and practical experience. 2. The fact that practice is often misleadingly associated with specific sorts of 'events'. The really murky concept in this whole debate is not theory at all; it is practice. Practice is not some epoch making event only; it is also going to work, having sex, arguing with someone in a bar, writing a poem, sustaining friendships, etc. 3. At the same time I think it can also be misleading to say that all people are engaged in theory no matter who they are. Obviously there is a sense in which this is true, but people who are semi-literate, for example, are deprived of a key element of experience, engaging with the history of ideas (yep, through books!) and thereby learning to think in a theoretical way. 4. The Leninist baggage of What is to be Done? I don't know about anyone else, but I have always found quite funny the image of Lenin running into the library to get a copy of Hegel's Logic to read after hearing of Kautsky's betrayal. Lenin seems to have had a really mechanistic and naive view of the relationship between theory and practice. The whole point of a critical marxism is I think to settle accounts with this heritage and move on.
Tahir
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